We had a utility that kept a string variable for a hit list within a document. It was a VB app and we were using Hungarian notation, so the variable was "sHitList". The guy who coded it "never thought of it that way".
No one's mentioned the fact that elite school tuiton/prep/etc. is a huge con game. I'm not saying those schools don't have top programs and/or top students, but I don't believe they are an order of magnitude (or more) better than cheaper state schools. Also parents spend a ton of money buying their kids' way into top schools via test prep (I used to teach those classes) and so forth. I went to UNC-Chapel Hill even though I got accepted to Duke. After sitting in classes at both, as a 17-year-old it was obvious that Duke wasn't worth the money. After interacting with Duke students over the next four years, it was also obvious that the students weren't much brighter. It was, however, obvious that they were richer.
I guess I'm jaded, but I feel like anyone with an IQ of 100 can buy a Masters or PhD given enough money and desire. I'm not too impressed by those sorts of credentials - I have to meet the person to develop a judgement. Filtering interviewees based on which school they attended seems just silly.
I am a leftist free-speech-type liberal, and I don't want to ban anything. However, I think it is quite pathetic that the people involved in GTA, for example, spent that much of their time and talent on something so depraved. Of course that's my opinion. Just like the infamous "I'll know pornography when I see it" argument, right? I'm drawing a personal line that says "I like Warcraft, but GTA is sick and I'm not playing it", but someone else may choose to draw the line differently.
One thing I do notice about a lot of these posts, however, is that people are falling into the trap of rationalizing based on their current behavior rather than examining that behavior. "I play super violent games all the time and I never killed anyone" is about as valid an argument as "I smoke all the time and I don't have cancer, do I?" Maybe we should all think more about why we are drawn to violent movies, games, etc. and whether it's a good idea to give in to that desire so frequently. Just a thought.
Of course, if people flame my post I am going to say they are angry because they play too many violent video games *g*
"some people do more than $5 million worth of work."
I disagree and find this an offensive statement. I have worked in corporate management and as a janitor, and it's unclear to me what $5 million worth of work looks like. Corporate executives have a lot of stress on them, but it's not more than anyone else has - just different. There are also plenty of cases where companies succeed in spite of their blunders due to the hard work of people earning, say, $50,000.
Let's see... I make 85k as development manager and I work pretty hard (but not ridiculously so) and am often the last to leave work. Where are these mythical people that work 59 times harder than me and are 59 times smarter and more talented than I am? I'm guessing they aren't heading up Fortune 500 companies.
Some of these points are good, but the writer's tone suggests that he is on a vindictive rampage far more biased than anything I've ever seen on Wikipedia. As soon as I read "wannabe self-styled "encyclopedia"" my respect for his article went to zero.
I work at a company that writes applicant tracking software (ATS) and hosts it for use by large companies. I totally agree with some of the deficiencies of the job boards (especially the spam:content ratio), but there are some hurdles to creating a system that works well for both recruiters and candidates.
Regarding the skill/job category issue - there's no real standard, although the government and a few other organizations have their lists. Companies who use our software are typically use it to post to both their own career site (which we host) and to a number of job boards including Monster. Sadly *every one* of these sites has its own skill categorizations, salary range dropdowns, education level value list, and so forth. This means that we spend an obscene amount of time creating job post mapping databases and mapping clients' custom values to the various job boards. It's god-awful. There is an organization that's been working for some years on at least agreeing what the entities are in HR (www.hr-xml.org).
A lot of people are working on solving the searching problems, the data re-entry problems (e.g. having to fill out 50 applications with similar data), and even the recruiter spam problem. It's slow going though. At this point if I was looking for a job I'd do something like this:
- use Monster as a guide for creating a draft resume; - make it public just for the hell of it; but then - ask my friends about their companies and visit those web sites directly, or better yet - look for an insider who will refer me.
I do sometimes wonder about the irony of writing software that has both:
1. Features to cast the net as wide as possible and get thousands of applicants per job. 2. Features to whittle down the huge list of applicants because the recruiters can't look at them all.
Regarding the latter, you might be surprised that these systems contain automated agents that only pull a few resumes out of the pack (based on very fallible search/matching algorithms) for the recruiters to actually look at.
Another software developer at my shop was having strange performance problems and occasional lockups wiht his work PC. We have a separate IT group so normally we don't open our own cases, but he decided to take matters into his own hands due to the support queue. When he opened the case he found a large tupperware lid lying on the motherboard, apparently left by a hungry IT guy. Removing it solved the problem.
I guess this is the PC equivalent of having a surgical instrument sewed into your belly... lol
Doesn't the fact that outsourced projects involve a statement of work and a contract make any comparisons of success or efficiency impossible? For example, where I work, internal software developers are at the mercy of sales, product management and often must work with poor requirements, impossible deadlines, and insufficient staffing. An outsourced project has all of this negotiated up front, so is at a *huge* advantage. If I could tell the non-technical parts of my company, "Ok, I'll do that project, but I'll need 3 more people and 6 more months, and written requirements", I'll bet I could compete a lot better.
Also, the outsourced projects I've seen have been made successful partly by the (undocumented) time spent by regular employees "training" and "helping" the offshore people.
>>"Also, it's inarguable, if not well-known, that neoclassical economics is fatally flawed"
>Yet, it is the best system known.
The main problems I have with it are that 1) it assumes that infinite growth is possible even though we live on a planet with finite resources; 2) it assumes that people behave rationally with respect to economic issues; 3) it generally does not deal well with the problem of externalities - for example, the social and environmental costs of growth.
>>"Letting corporations do whatever they want is just as bad as letting the pre-breakup "
>Except this is never the case. Corporations are by design accountable to shareholders, employees, and customers. They must serve all 3 or they will fail.
I fail to see how a company is "accountable" to the workers it lays off. Also, you are right that corporations are accountable to shareholders and customers, but this depends on both complete transparency to customers (in reality obfuscated via misleading adveristments and various other sleight-of-hand) and complete internalization of costs to allow shareholders to push for the best decisions. Shareholders do not usually account for the social, environmental, and other external costs of corporate decisions, and pro-corporate government does not place any pressure on corporations to internalize these costs.
>>"Why are people so deeply distrustful of "big government", but willing to accept an unlimited amount of abuse from private industry?"
>They aren't. If government abuses you, you are a corpse with a bullet in your head. If a company abuses you (i.e. charges too much for a product), you go buy it elsewhere.
If we leave aside for the moment extreme governments such as those who slaughter their citizens (e.g. Hussein's Iraq), then the situations are more similar. I'm not thinking of the "hey, this costs too much" kind of abuse; I'm thinking of the "hey, I just got laid off so that some stockholders can earn more money" kind. Doesn't it strike you as problematic that shareholders encourage corporations to save costs wherever possible, without regard to the moral implications? Basically by participating in the stock market we as a society are saying "Please take from others and give to us", and because we're not talking about an equal playing field, wealth migrates upwards.
>> " Rather they exist specifically to concentrate as much wealth as possible in the hands of as few people as possible"
> This has absolutely nothing to do with anything, let alone why companies exist.
Ok, so if corporations don't exist to make money for those running it, what are they for? To promote truth, justice, and the American way?:-p
>> "So most of the pundits and economists arguing about how great NAFTA etc. are for everyone have no idea what they are talking about"
> They know what they are talking about. Those who oppose NAFTA have no idea what they are talking about: they don't want the people to make economic decisions.
I don't see what an agreement pushed through by extensive lobbying for a few major corporations has to do with "people" making economic decisions. Corporations are not people endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; they don't have an intrinsic "right" to do whatever they want. Even if you assume that shareholders have direct control over what a corporation does, the level of control is (obviously) proportional to the number of shares held, so we've suddenly gone from "one person, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote". This has nothing to do with democracy.
It's a common fallacy to assume or imply that unrestricted "free trade" and corporate rights follow directly from democracy. In fact, the two are not particularly related.
I'd like to see some honest discussion of the deeper problem, which is that corporations are artificial constructs that operate outside the control of individual nations or investors/board members, and do not have as their goal the betterment of society or the individual. Rather they exist specifically to concentrate as much wealth as possible in the hands of as few people as possible. It's therefore not surprising that these creations move labor to where the cost is lower.
Also, it's inarguable, if not well-known, that neoclassical economics is fatally flawed and does not apply to the current world economy. So most of the pundits and economists arguing about how great NAFTA etc. are for everyone have no idea what they are talking about, despite their training. Neoclassical economics is based on many false assumptions, and "proofs" of the benefits of unbridled international capitalism are therefore wrong. Letting corporations do whatever they want is just as bad as letting the pre-breakup Soviet government do whatever it wanted.
For that matter, I'm curious: Why are people so deeply distrustful of "big government", but willing to accept an unlimited amount of abuse from private industry? It's just the same problem with a different name.
I love it when Brian the dog says stuff like "Make me a vodka stinger with a whiskey back, and step on it!":-p
I'm zipping through the DVDs fast and loving it. Far better than any Simpsons past season 7 (IMO the old Simpson episode guide ends about when the series gets bad). I'm chuckling thinking about when they inherit the mansion and Stewie tormets the servants, especially when he orders two of them to fight to the death for his amusement *lol*
Slashdot Mirror
We had a utility that kept a string variable for a hit list within a document. It was a VB app and we were using Hungarian notation, so the variable was "sHitList". The guy who coded it "never thought of it that way".
No one's mentioned the fact that elite school tuiton/prep/etc. is a huge con game. I'm not saying those schools don't have top programs and/or top students, but I don't believe they are an order of magnitude (or more) better than cheaper state schools. Also parents spend a ton of money buying their kids' way into top schools via test prep (I used to teach those classes) and so forth. I went to UNC-Chapel Hill even though I got accepted to Duke. After sitting in classes at both, as a 17-year-old it was obvious that Duke wasn't worth the money. After interacting with Duke students over the next four years, it was also obvious that the students weren't much brighter. It was, however, obvious that they were richer.
I guess I'm jaded, but I feel like anyone with an IQ of 100 can buy a Masters or PhD given enough money and desire. I'm not too impressed by those sorts of credentials - I have to meet the person to develop a judgement. Filtering interviewees based on which school they attended seems just silly.
I am a leftist free-speech-type liberal, and I don't want to ban anything. However, I think it is quite pathetic that the people involved in GTA, for example, spent that much of their time and talent on something so depraved. Of course that's my opinion. Just like the infamous "I'll know pornography when I see it" argument, right? I'm drawing a personal line that says "I like Warcraft, but GTA is sick and I'm not playing it", but someone else may choose to draw the line differently.
One thing I do notice about a lot of these posts, however, is that people are falling into the trap of rationalizing based on their current behavior rather than examining that behavior. "I play super violent games all the time and I never killed anyone" is about as valid an argument as "I smoke all the time and I don't have cancer, do I?" Maybe we should all think more about why we are drawn to violent movies, games, etc. and whether it's a good idea to give in to that desire so frequently. Just a thought.
Of course, if people flame my post I am going to say they are angry because they play too many violent video games *g*
"some people do more than $5 million worth of work." I disagree and find this an offensive statement. I have worked in corporate management and as a janitor, and it's unclear to me what $5 million worth of work looks like. Corporate executives have a lot of stress on them, but it's not more than anyone else has - just different. There are also plenty of cases where companies succeed in spite of their blunders due to the hard work of people earning, say, $50,000. Let's see ... I make 85k as development manager and I work pretty hard (but not ridiculously so) and am often the last to leave work. Where are these mythical people that work 59 times harder than me and are 59 times smarter and more talented than I am? I'm guessing they aren't heading up Fortune 500 companies.
Some of these points are good, but the writer's tone suggests that he is on a vindictive rampage far more biased than anything I've ever seen on Wikipedia. As soon as I read "wannabe self-styled "encyclopedia"" my respect for his article went to zero.
I work at a company that writes applicant tracking software (ATS) and hosts it for use by large companies. I totally agree with some of the deficiencies of the job boards (especially the spam:content ratio), but there are some hurdles to creating a system that works well for both recruiters and candidates.
.... :-)
Regarding the skill/job category issue - there's no real standard, although the government and a few other organizations have their lists. Companies who use our software are typically use it to post to both their own career site (which we host) and to a number of job boards including Monster. Sadly *every one* of these sites has its own skill categorizations, salary range dropdowns, education level value list, and so forth. This means that we spend an obscene amount of time creating job post mapping databases and mapping clients' custom values to the various job boards. It's god-awful. There is an organization that's been working for some years on at least agreeing what the entities are in HR (www.hr-xml.org).
A lot of people are working on solving the searching problems, the data re-entry problems (e.g. having to fill out 50 applications with similar data), and even the recruiter spam problem. It's slow going though. At this point if I was looking for a job I'd do something like this:
- use Monster as a guide for creating a draft resume;
- make it public just for the hell of it; but then
- ask my friends about their companies and visit those web sites directly, or better yet
- look for an insider who will refer me.
I do sometimes wonder about the irony of writing software that has both:
1. Features to cast the net as wide as possible and get thousands of applicants per job.
2. Features to whittle down the huge list of applicants because the recruiters can't look at them all.
Regarding the latter, you might be surprised that these systems contain automated agents that only pull a few resumes out of the pack (based on very fallible search/matching algorithms) for the recruiters to actually look at.
Good luck
Another software developer at my shop was having strange performance problems and occasional lockups wiht his work PC. We have a separate IT group so normally we don't open our own cases, but he decided to take matters into his own hands due to the support queue. When he opened the case he found a large tupperware lid lying on the motherboard, apparently left by a hungry IT guy. Removing it solved the problem.
... lol
I guess this is the PC equivalent of having a surgical instrument sewed into your belly
Doesn't the fact that outsourced projects involve a statement of work and a contract make any comparisons of success or efficiency impossible? For example, where I work, internal software developers are at the mercy of sales, product management and often must work with poor requirements, impossible deadlines, and insufficient staffing. An outsourced project has all of this negotiated up front, so is at a *huge* advantage. If I could tell the non-technical parts of my company, "Ok, I'll do that project, but I'll need 3 more people and 6 more months, and written requirements", I'll bet I could compete a lot better. Also, the outsourced projects I've seen have been made successful partly by the (undocumented) time spent by regular employees "training" and "helping" the offshore people.
>>"Also, it's inarguable, if not well-known, that neoclassical economics is fatally flawed"
:-p
>Yet, it is the best system known.
The main problems I have with it are that 1) it assumes that infinite growth is possible even though we live on a planet with finite resources; 2) it assumes that people behave rationally with respect to economic issues; 3) it generally does not deal well with the problem of externalities - for example, the social and environmental costs of growth.
>>"Letting corporations do whatever they want is just as bad as letting the pre-breakup "
>Except this is never the case. Corporations are by design accountable to shareholders, employees, and customers. They must serve all 3 or they will fail.
I fail to see how a company is "accountable" to the workers it lays off. Also, you are right that corporations are accountable to shareholders and customers, but this depends on both complete transparency to customers (in reality obfuscated via misleading adveristments and various other sleight-of-hand) and complete internalization of costs to allow shareholders to push for the best decisions. Shareholders do not usually account for the social, environmental, and other external costs of corporate decisions, and pro-corporate government does not place any pressure on corporations to internalize these costs.
>>"Why are people so deeply distrustful of "big government", but willing to accept an unlimited amount of abuse from private industry?"
>They aren't. If government abuses you, you are a corpse with a bullet in your head. If a company abuses you (i.e. charges too much for a product), you go buy it elsewhere.
If we leave aside for the moment extreme governments such as those who slaughter their citizens (e.g. Hussein's Iraq), then the situations are more similar. I'm not thinking of the "hey, this costs too much" kind of abuse; I'm thinking of the "hey, I just got laid off so that some stockholders can earn more money" kind. Doesn't it strike you as problematic that shareholders encourage corporations to save costs wherever possible, without regard to the moral implications? Basically by participating in the stock market we as a society are saying "Please take from others and give to us", and because we're not talking about an equal playing field, wealth migrates upwards.
>> " Rather they exist specifically to concentrate as much wealth as possible in the hands of as few people as possible"
> This has absolutely nothing to do with anything, let alone why companies exist.
Ok, so if corporations don't exist to make money for those running it, what are they for? To promote truth, justice, and the American way?
>> "So most of the pundits and economists arguing about how great NAFTA etc. are for everyone have no idea what they are talking about"
> They know what they are talking about. Those who oppose NAFTA have no idea what they are talking about: they don't want the people to make economic decisions.
I don't see what an agreement pushed through by extensive lobbying for a few major corporations has to do with "people" making economic decisions. Corporations are not people endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights; they don't have an intrinsic "right" to do whatever they want. Even if you assume that shareholders have direct control over what a corporation does, the level of control is (obviously) proportional to the number of shares held, so we've suddenly gone from "one person, one vote" to "one dollar, one vote". This has nothing to do with democracy.
It's a common fallacy to assume or imply that unrestricted "free trade" and corporate rights follow directly from democracy. In fact, the two are not particularly related.
Interesting topic.
I'd like to see some honest discussion of the deeper problem, which is that corporations are artificial constructs that operate outside the control of individual nations or investors/board members, and do not have as their goal the betterment of society or the individual. Rather they exist specifically to concentrate as much wealth as possible in the hands of as few people as possible. It's therefore not surprising that these creations move labor to where the cost is lower.
Also, it's inarguable, if not well-known, that neoclassical economics is fatally flawed and does not apply to the current world economy. So most of the pundits and economists arguing about how great NAFTA etc. are for everyone have no idea what they are talking about, despite their training. Neoclassical economics is based on many false assumptions, and "proofs" of the benefits of unbridled international capitalism are therefore wrong. Letting corporations do whatever they want is just as bad as letting the pre-breakup Soviet government do whatever it wanted.
For that matter, I'm curious: Why are people so deeply distrustful of "big government", but willing to accept an unlimited amount of abuse from private industry? It's just the same problem with a different name.
Cheers,
freecell_wizard
I love it when Brian the dog says stuff like "Make me a vodka stinger with a whiskey back, and step on it!" :-p
I'm zipping through the DVDs fast and loving it. Far better than any Simpsons past season 7 (IMO the old Simpson episode guide ends about when the series gets bad). I'm chuckling thinking about when they inherit the mansion and Stewie tormets the servants, especially when he orders two of them to fight to the death for his amusement *lol*