That was my thought as well. The more appropriate quote, too, was not regarding the interior of the ship, which was merely black (and lots of it), but the exterior of the ship. Ford's line before the entered the ship - "It's so black - you can hardly even make out its shape. Light just falls into it." - seemed a much better fit for this story.
Keep copies of the contracts and statements of work to show what you were contracted to do. Contact the client (not the developer currently maintaining the code, but that developer's manager or whomever at the client signed the contract) and ask them for a letter to clarify that you did the original work for them, regardless of the copyright notices in the code now.
Be polite about it, and most clients will be happy to help.
Gah, I misspelt it. Of course, I meant Scrum.:) (What was I saying about being familiar with the terminology being as important as being able to do it?):)
It's not an either-or, companies want people with a degree and real world experience so if you got one, work on the other. It can be really tough to land a good first/early job no matter how good your degree is if they got other applications also with good degrees and a bit more experience and the less prestigious jobs will often see that you're looking to get a bit of experience and leave for greener pastures.
Yes, it is important as well not to spend a lot of time early in your career hopping between different jobs. Employers want people who are stable, and I've seen plenty of people who spent 6 months at a string of different jobs be turned down because they're perceived as "too opportunistic".
It costs money to hire and develop an employee, and those who jump between jobs are perceived as not worth the investment of time or money to hire.
For my own part, I've done the studying for the PMP and just need to get to the point that I'm ready for the exam (I'm pretty good with project management, but I learned mostly "by doing", so I had to study up on the official terminology and such - and I'm not a very good exam taker, sadly - and I worked in technical certification and testing for a number of years).
Personally, I've ended up moving into technical writing, documentation, and training materials development. My background in programming, IT, and technology really serves me well for that - and along the way, I served as a technical instructor and a program manager. That makes for an interesting career path, too - you go from having done on-call 24x7x365 (or less if you've got more IT people and are part of a larger organization) to being able to work 9-5 if you want (as an independent writer, certainly) except when a deadline is looming.
I've found this to be a great way to get deep exposure to a number of different technologies as well - and the weeks that there isn't any work, I can rest up for the next job. I've had more vacation time the past two years than at anytime in my career - just no resources to travel yet since I'm getting started in this line of work. The only downside (which most consultants and contractors will be very familiar with) is the uncertainty of the next gig.
I guess the point here is that having business skills, writing skills, people skills, and great technical skills is a good combination as well - but if you want to continue down an IT path or working for companies, a degree is a huge foot in the door. I've been burned a number of times in job interviews because I lack a degree - and at least in the US, that should be a serious consideration for any candidate who is looking to get into the job market.
70% of IT professionals these days have some sort of degree.
Tech skills on their own won't get you far - back in the late 80's and early 90's when I got started in the field, it was sufficient. I dropped out of college to pursue an IT career and did very well for 15 years in the field before moving on to other stuff.
Then I got laid off, and the lack of degree has really hurt my ability to get a job in this economy. I currently do contract writing for software companies, and that pays well enough - when there's work to do.
My advice would be to pursue the degree while working full-time, either as an intern or other full-time position. The degree, sadly, will be more valuable than the experience.
In the IT field, things that help are the ability to solve business problems (IOW, don't focus strictly on technology) and to manage projects. PMP certification will get you farther than any technical certification (the tech certification market has been in decline for years). Companies don't want to hire someone with specific technical skills - they want people who can function independently and can manage IT projects. Being able to do that will really help you.
A CS degree in combination with project management skills, familiarity with Agile/SCRUMM development methodologies, and business skills will take you farther these days than tech skills alone.
I spent some time late last year and earlier this year working very closely with the developers of BetterLinux, and in the work I did, I did stress testing (on a limited scale) to see how the product performed. It has some OSS components and some closed-source components, but the I/O leveling they do is pretty amazing.
The PC version multiplayer may not work well, but the PS3 version sure does. I started playing a solo game, and my stepson (who has his own copy and PS3) came online and joined my single-player game with no trouble at all. I wasn't even aware that it would do that. What is lacking is some player-to-player communication options when the bluetooth headset isn't available (had some trouble with pairing mine and ended up horking the PS3's bluetooth up until the next restart).
Having played the first game all the way through, I like the UI changes so far.
Use something like blockhosts to deny connections to addresses that have repeated unsuccessful attempts.
Use public key/private key pairs for authentication and disable password authentication completely.
Use a non-standard port for the ssh service.
Who to report them to? Unless you're actually compromised and suffer harm, there really isn't anyone who is going to look into it; seriously, reporting every potential attacker results in nothing more than a very large scale game of whack-a-mole.
Pair someone with strong programming skills with someone with strong sales skills. Lots of tech companies supplement their sales staff with "sales engineers" who know the technology. It's not unusual, and many IT organizations are impressed to have someone with expertise sent along with the sales people.
That you didn't find it funny is fine. I don't post a lot on/., so I don't expect everyone to understand when I'm being funny. But no, I'm not trying to "cover up" that it was stupid. It was intended to be stupid, but I neglected to put sufficient context in there. I didn't take my audience into consideration (I usually write things like this to people who know me well enough to know when I'm being satirical or silly about something).
I actually do have a bit of a background in astronomy, and I read Phil's blog regularly. Unlike others who comment on stories here, I actually/did/ read the story before I posted. But I could see the potential for stupidity in replies, so I was more or less doing a bad "Gumby" impression for the benefit of those who didn't RTFA and were replying (or thinking) in a similar manner.
I see your point about it "smelling" like Faux News tripe. My bad for not making it extrordinarily clear that it was intended to be satire (indeed, I well could have prefaced it with a comment saying "Here's how Fox News would respond to this:".
I'll grant that some additional context to make it clear would've pulled it off better.
BMO, realizing that he wrote a reply to something without reading the follow-up post, tries to cover up his stupidity by saying something else that's stupid.
And yes, I do know that not all stars go supernova. Folks, RTFA rather than relying on the summary. The summary should have been better written, and that's what I was aiming for - a little silliness, and a jab about the summary on/. being very unclear on a few points.:)
I'd have to say that if this criteria is for a "supernova candidate", the nearest supernova candidate to us would be THE SUN. Because it's bound to go supernova one day, just like every other star in the universe.
The next nearest supernova candidate would be proxima centauri. But it probably won't cause any damage to the Earth either, and probably isn't likely to go off for a few million years either.
Damn, I should've been an astronomer - if this is all it takes to "make news".
Absolutely; as I just wrote in another reply, a certification is a measurement of a minimally-qualified candidate, and most employers aren't satisfied with hiring minimally-qualified candidates.
I think they posted based on their own experiences in the field of IT. I also have a certain amount of cynicism about the value certifications; I didn't earn any until after I started with Novell 8 years ago.
Of the ones that I took, the exams that I found to be the most challenging (and rewarding to pass) were the performance-based exams associated with the Novell Certified Directory Engineer (which was definitely a cert worth earning when it was available) and with the Novell Certified Linux Professional. RedHat's exams are similar, and I know that their focus is on doing only performance-based testing (to my knowledge, they don't have any exams that are traditional forms-based exams).
There are a lot of people who create certifications who really don't understand what the goal is, and they don't go through the process of a proper psychometric evaluation of their exams, which means the tests aren't fair or an accurate representation of what a person knows. The fact that there are braindumps available for so many exams also devalues the certification because people rely on short-term memorisation of an answer key rather than actually learning what is needed to pass the exams, and eventually the assumption becomes that anyone who earned the certification likely earned it not by learning the actual content but rather by taking the 'easy way' and just learning what was on the exam.
The goal of any properly created certification (or exam) is to demonstrate competence for the minimally-qualified candidate. It sets a bar, but particularly at the entry level, it is only for the candidate at the lowest knowledge or skill. Experience counts more for a lot of employers (and I depended on that for years), but there are some (and I interviewed with one 15 years ago myself) who get hung up on the candidate not holding a certification, so not having it can be a barrier (or for me, not having it was a qualifier for a prospective employer - if the cert was more important to them than my experience, I didn't want to work for them).
Clearly, though, there are fields where certification is mandatory. To practice medicine in the US, for example, you need to be board certified. To work on cars, you generally need your ASE. To be an accountant, you need to be a CPA. To practice law, you have to pass the bar exam (which is a license, but licensing and certification are closely related).
The original purpose of IT certification (which Novell started in the industry) was to provide technical support resources outside Novell's support organization who were competent to support NetWare - the sales growth Novell saw at the time meant they couldn't build a large enough support staff to adequately provide technical support for the product. The CNE was created largely for partner organizations to prove to customers that their staff understood NetWare well enough to support it, and at that time (back in the mid- to late- 80's) it was required for people to provide support on the product.
The parent here is perhaps meant to be funny, but there is a nugget of truth in what he says.
Actually creating a certification takes a lot of work - I spent the past 5 years working as part of the team that worked on IT certification programs and exams at Novell. But to understand what certifications hold value in the industry, it does help to understand the process by which a program is created, because if a program isn't built around sound principles, then the certification will be worthless as anything other than a wall decoration.
First, you have to certify based on something people actually do. Certifications that have real value start with a job task analysis (JTA) and the program is built around what people actually do for a living. It doesn't do you any good to certify based on criteria that don't map to a specific job function.
Second, the testing methodology needs to be sound. People laugh about paper certifications, but paper certs are a real problem in the industry. This can happen because a question pool is leaked and a 'braindump' is created. Dealing with braindump sites is like playing whack-a-mole. So the testing methodology should resist braindumps, either through adaptive testing or through the use of performance based testing (sometimes called 'practical testing' or some variation of that). Practical testing tends to be more resistant to braindumps because that type of resource gives you the answer - but in a practical exam, you have to demonstrate the application of the answer. So if the braindump tells you "do x, y, and z", those are the steps you need to do to complete the tasks.
If a certification is ISO 17024 compliant, then it has increased value as well. That ISO standard specifies a number of things (which are adopted by other organisations, like ANSI) about how a certification is built. Vendor-specific certifications tend to not be ISO 17024 compliant (there are a few exceptions) sometimes because of cost or resource requirements. As I understand it, there are pieces of the standard that specify, for example, that the people who create the exam and the people who create the course materials cannot talk with each other about the content. The JTA information can (I think, it might be required or recommended) be shared between the two groups, but they must derive their own information from the pool of information about the topic. The purpose for this is that it's the knowledge that's needed, rather than the specific course materials created by the certifying body. In some cases, the certifying body just publishes the objectives and leaves it to others to create the courses around those objectives.
I'm also of the opinion that the value is higher if rather than relying on recall for answers, the exam requires cognitive skills. Exams like this tend to be much more labor intensive to create and evaluate properly to ensure they're fair, but that value is significant as well because then the certification shows that the candidate knows more than just the answer to the questions on the exam, but how to apply their knowledge in a useful way. Performance-based tests are really the best way to do this in my opinion.
The exams also must have gone through some form of psychometric analysis in order to be legally defensible. If a program uses multiple exam forms (which is generally the case), then the psychometric analysis is used to ensure the forms are fairly balanced and if a candidate can pass the exam on form 1, that they would most likely pass it on the other forms as well.
Thirdly, a properly built certification program is going to have continuing certification requirements. Some organizations (like CompTIA) used to certify "once and forever", but certifications like that really don't have that much value over the long term. I hold an LPIC-1 certification that I got in 2003, but that doesn't really tell anyone what I know about modern Linux distributions.
Certifications are helpful if you're going through the 'front door' trying t
I hadn't actually heard about this data center (I live in Utah), but there's a nagging little voice in the back of my head that's wondering if the NSA will hire prisoners from the nearby state prison, also located in Bluffdale.
Of course such an idea is ridiculous, but it's funny that the town will boast both an NSA data center and the state prison.
Slashdot Mirror
That was my thought as well. The more appropriate quote, too, was not regarding the interior of the ship, which was merely black (and lots of it), but the exterior of the ship. Ford's line before the entered the ship - "It's so black - you can hardly even make out its shape. Light just falls into it." - seemed a much better fit for this story.
Keep copies of the contracts and statements of work to show what you were contracted to do. Contact the client (not the developer currently maintaining the code, but that developer's manager or whomever at the client signed the contract) and ask them for a letter to clarify that you did the original work for them, regardless of the copyright notices in the code now.
Be polite about it, and most clients will be happy to help.
Gah, I misspelt it. Of course, I meant Scrum. :) (What was I saying about being familiar with the terminology being as important as being able to do it?) :)
It's not an either-or, companies want people with a degree and real world experience so if you got one, work on the other. It can be really tough to land a good first/early job no matter how good your degree is if they got other applications also with good degrees and a bit more experience and the less prestigious jobs will often see that you're looking to get a bit of experience and leave for greener pastures.
Yes, it is important as well not to spend a lot of time early in your career hopping between different jobs. Employers want people who are stable, and I've seen plenty of people who spent 6 months at a string of different jobs be turned down because they're perceived as "too opportunistic".
It costs money to hire and develop an employee, and those who jump between jobs are perceived as not worth the investment of time or money to hire.
For my own part, I've done the studying for the PMP and just need to get to the point that I'm ready for the exam (I'm pretty good with project management, but I learned mostly "by doing", so I had to study up on the official terminology and such - and I'm not a very good exam taker, sadly - and I worked in technical certification and testing for a number of years).
Personally, I've ended up moving into technical writing, documentation, and training materials development. My background in programming, IT, and technology really serves me well for that - and along the way, I served as a technical instructor and a program manager. That makes for an interesting career path, too - you go from having done on-call 24x7x365 (or less if you've got more IT people and are part of a larger organization) to being able to work 9-5 if you want (as an independent writer, certainly) except when a deadline is looming.
I've found this to be a great way to get deep exposure to a number of different technologies as well - and the weeks that there isn't any work, I can rest up for the next job. I've had more vacation time the past two years than at anytime in my career - just no resources to travel yet since I'm getting started in this line of work. The only downside (which most consultants and contractors will be very familiar with) is the uncertainty of the next gig.
I guess the point here is that having business skills, writing skills, people skills, and great technical skills is a good combination as well - but if you want to continue down an IT path or working for companies, a degree is a huge foot in the door. I've been burned a number of times in job interviews because I lack a degree - and at least in the US, that should be a serious consideration for any candidate who is looking to get into the job market.
Jim
70% of IT professionals these days have some sort of degree.
Tech skills on their own won't get you far - back in the late 80's and early 90's when I got started in the field, it was sufficient. I dropped out of college to pursue an IT career and did very well for 15 years in the field before moving on to other stuff.
Then I got laid off, and the lack of degree has really hurt my ability to get a job in this economy. I currently do contract writing for software companies, and that pays well enough - when there's work to do.
My advice would be to pursue the degree while working full-time, either as an intern or other full-time position. The degree, sadly, will be more valuable than the experience.
In the IT field, things that help are the ability to solve business problems (IOW, don't focus strictly on technology) and to manage projects. PMP certification will get you farther than any technical certification (the tech certification market has been in decline for years). Companies don't want to hire someone with specific technical skills - they want people who can function independently and can manage IT projects. Being able to do that will really help you.
A CS degree in combination with project management skills, familiarity with Agile/SCRUMM development methodologies, and business skills will take you farther these days than tech skills alone.
Jim
And there's a huge difference between "detailing the crack down on [OWS]" and "detailing the crackdown on [OWS]".
Looks like the author of the summary didn't RTFA, since they actually got it right in TFA.
I spent some time late last year and earlier this year working very closely with the developers of BetterLinux, and in the work I did, I did stress testing (on a limited scale) to see how the product performed. It has some OSS components and some closed-source components, but the I/O leveling they do is pretty amazing.
http://www.betterlinux.com/
The PC version multiplayer may not work well, but the PS3 version sure does. I started playing a solo game, and my stepson (who has his own copy and PS3) came online and joined my single-player game with no trouble at all. I wasn't even aware that it would do that. What is lacking is some player-to-player communication options when the bluetooth headset isn't available (had some trouble with pairing mine and ended up horking the PS3's bluetooth up until the next restart).
Having played the first game all the way through, I like the UI changes so far.
Use something like blockhosts to deny connections to addresses that have repeated unsuccessful attempts.
Use public key/private key pairs for authentication and disable password authentication completely.
Use a non-standard port for the ssh service.
Who to report them to? Unless you're actually compromised and suffer harm, there really isn't anyone who is going to look into it; seriously, reporting every potential attacker results in nothing more than a very large scale game of whack-a-mole.
Pair someone with strong programming skills with someone with strong sales skills. Lots of tech companies supplement their sales staff with "sales engineers" who know the technology. It's not unusual, and many IT organizations are impressed to have someone with expertise sent along with the sales people.
Got this one myself last December, and I use the numeric keypad on it quite a bit - it's comfortable and easy to use.
I'm really happy with it.
Yup. That thought occurred to me after you "called me out". Not a lot of people are familiar with Poe's Law (though more are now).
So something good comes out of my error. :)
That you didn't find it funny is fine. I don't post a lot on /., so I don't expect everyone to understand when I'm being funny. But no, I'm not trying to "cover up" that it was stupid. It was intended to be stupid, but I neglected to put sufficient context in there. I didn't take my audience into consideration (I usually write things like this to people who know me well enough to know when I'm being satirical or silly about something).
I actually do have a bit of a background in astronomy, and I read Phil's blog regularly. Unlike others who comment on stories here, I actually /did/ read the story before I posted. But I could see the potential for stupidity in replies, so I was more or less doing a bad "Gumby" impression for the benefit of those who didn't RTFA and were replying (or thinking) in a similar manner.
I see your point about it "smelling" like Faux News tripe. My bad for not making it extrordinarily clear that it was intended to be satire (indeed, I well could have prefaced it with a comment saying "Here's how Fox News would respond to this:".
I'll grant that some additional context to make it clear would've pulled it off better.
Live and learn.
You don't do satire, do you?
BMO, realizing that he wrote a reply to something without reading the follow-up post, tries to cover up his stupidity by saying something else that's stupid.
Well, done.
Did you bother to read my reply to myself? I indicated I understood it, that this was intended satirically.
You fail at reading. Hard.
And yes, I do know that not all stars go supernova. Folks, RTFA rather than relying on the summary. The summary should have been better written, and that's what I was aiming for - a little silliness, and a jab about the summary on /. being very unclear on a few points. :)
I'd have to say that if this criteria is for a "supernova candidate", the nearest supernova candidate to us would be THE SUN. Because it's bound to go supernova one day, just like every other star in the universe.
The next nearest supernova candidate would be proxima centauri. But it probably won't cause any damage to the Earth either, and probably isn't likely to go off for a few million years either.
Damn, I should've been an astronomer - if this is all it takes to "make news".
http://www.flashuser.net.nyud.net:8080/inspiration/30-creative-404-error-pages.html
Absolutely; as I just wrote in another reply, a certification is a measurement of a minimally-qualified candidate, and most employers aren't satisfied with hiring minimally-qualified candidates.
I think they posted based on their own experiences in the field of IT. I also have a certain amount of cynicism about the value certifications; I didn't earn any until after I started with Novell 8 years ago.
Of the ones that I took, the exams that I found to be the most challenging (and rewarding to pass) were the performance-based exams associated with the Novell Certified Directory Engineer (which was definitely a cert worth earning when it was available) and with the Novell Certified Linux Professional. RedHat's exams are similar, and I know that their focus is on doing only performance-based testing (to my knowledge, they don't have any exams that are traditional forms-based exams).
There are a lot of people who create certifications who really don't understand what the goal is, and they don't go through the process of a proper psychometric evaluation of their exams, which means the tests aren't fair or an accurate representation of what a person knows. The fact that there are braindumps available for so many exams also devalues the certification because people rely on short-term memorisation of an answer key rather than actually learning what is needed to pass the exams, and eventually the assumption becomes that anyone who earned the certification likely earned it not by learning the actual content but rather by taking the 'easy way' and just learning what was on the exam.
The goal of any properly created certification (or exam) is to demonstrate competence for the minimally-qualified candidate. It sets a bar, but particularly at the entry level, it is only for the candidate at the lowest knowledge or skill. Experience counts more for a lot of employers (and I depended on that for years), but there are some (and I interviewed with one 15 years ago myself) who get hung up on the candidate not holding a certification, so not having it can be a barrier (or for me, not having it was a qualifier for a prospective employer - if the cert was more important to them than my experience, I didn't want to work for them).
Clearly, though, there are fields where certification is mandatory. To practice medicine in the US, for example, you need to be board certified. To work on cars, you generally need your ASE. To be an accountant, you need to be a CPA. To practice law, you have to pass the bar exam (which is a license, but licensing and certification are closely related).
The original purpose of IT certification (which Novell started in the industry) was to provide technical support resources outside Novell's support organization who were competent to support NetWare - the sales growth Novell saw at the time meant they couldn't build a large enough support staff to adequately provide technical support for the product. The CNE was created largely for partner organizations to prove to customers that their staff understood NetWare well enough to support it, and at that time (back in the mid- to late- 80's) it was required for people to provide support on the product.
The parent here is perhaps meant to be funny, but there is a nugget of truth in what he says.
Actually creating a certification takes a lot of work - I spent the past 5 years working as part of the team that worked on IT certification programs and exams at Novell. But to understand what certifications hold value in the industry, it does help to understand the process by which a program is created, because if a program isn't built around sound principles, then the certification will be worthless as anything other than a wall decoration.
First, you have to certify based on something people actually do. Certifications that have real value start with a job task analysis (JTA) and the program is built around what people actually do for a living. It doesn't do you any good to certify based on criteria that don't map to a specific job function.
Second, the testing methodology needs to be sound. People laugh about paper certifications, but paper certs are a real problem in the industry. This can happen because a question pool is leaked and a 'braindump' is created. Dealing with braindump sites is like playing whack-a-mole. So the testing methodology should resist braindumps, either through adaptive testing or through the use of performance based testing (sometimes called 'practical testing' or some variation of that). Practical testing tends to be more resistant to braindumps because that type of resource gives you the answer - but in a practical exam, you have to demonstrate the application of the answer. So if the braindump tells you "do x, y, and z", those are the steps you need to do to complete the tasks.
If a certification is ISO 17024 compliant, then it has increased value as well. That ISO standard specifies a number of things (which are adopted by other organisations, like ANSI) about how a certification is built. Vendor-specific certifications tend to not be ISO 17024 compliant (there are a few exceptions) sometimes because of cost or resource requirements. As I understand it, there are pieces of the standard that specify, for example, that the people who create the exam and the people who create the course materials cannot talk with each other about the content. The JTA information can (I think, it might be required or recommended) be shared between the two groups, but they must derive their own information from the pool of information about the topic. The purpose for this is that it's the knowledge that's needed, rather than the specific course materials created by the certifying body. In some cases, the certifying body just publishes the objectives and leaves it to others to create the courses around those objectives.
I'm also of the opinion that the value is higher if rather than relying on recall for answers, the exam requires cognitive skills. Exams like this tend to be much more labor intensive to create and evaluate properly to ensure they're fair, but that value is significant as well because then the certification shows that the candidate knows more than just the answer to the questions on the exam, but how to apply their knowledge in a useful way. Performance-based tests are really the best way to do this in my opinion.
The exams also must have gone through some form of psychometric analysis in order to be legally defensible. If a program uses multiple exam forms (which is generally the case), then the psychometric analysis is used to ensure the forms are fairly balanced and if a candidate can pass the exam on form 1, that they would most likely pass it on the other forms as well.
Thirdly, a properly built certification program is going to have continuing certification requirements. Some organizations (like CompTIA) used to certify "once and forever", but certifications like that really don't have that much value over the long term. I hold an LPIC-1 certification that I got in 2003, but that doesn't really tell anyone what I know about modern Linux distributions.
Certifications are helpful if you're going through the 'front door' trying t
I hadn't actually heard about this data center (I live in Utah), but there's a nagging little voice in the back of my head that's wondering if the NSA will hire prisoners from the nearby state prison, also located in Bluffdale.
Of course such an idea is ridiculous, but it's funny that the town will boast both an NSA data center and the state prison.
Right....because the whole reason a generation of people can't spell is because of J. K. Rowling.