Perhaps, but it's not unreasonable that troubled companies need all hands on deck while at their most vulnerable.
If the person's job can be accomplished from home to begin with, what are they gaining from having them suddenly come into the office? "All hands on deck" doesn't require a physical set of hands if they didn't need them before.
I'm sick and tired of automatic systems that say "please be sure to listen to all of the following options as our menu has been changed". As a rule, they never give you a date when the menu has been changed, so this statement seems to typically be a lie used as an excuse to convince people to listen to the options every time.
The reason they want you to listen to all the options isn't because they change often. It's because too many people will push the first option they hear that vaguely sounds like it relates to what they need help with, when there was a later option that they needed to choose but didn't because they never hear it.
And this is ignoring all the people who just keep hitting "1" on their phones trying to get out of the IVR and reach someone as quickly as possible, only to find they are in the entirely wrong department when someone does answer and then getting angry at the representative.
I would be surprised if someone working a supermarket checkout job could afford to feed a family on that pay. Paying rent is probably a major hurdle itself. Probably one reason employers like that prefer high school/college kids. Besides being more biddable to crazy schedules and no benefits, the job is generally not needed to pay actual living expenses, so they'll accept what is below a "living wage" in the area.
Now, mind you, if more companies were intentionally hiring employees who show genuine customer focused attitudes -- for example, in the same fashion as the folks running Chick-fil-a seem to have done -- then the pendulum might start swinging back the other way. In the absence of that, I'll go to the kiosk at every opportunity.
There aren't really "genuine" customer focused attitudes, because the people in these roles don't have a reason to care. As you already pointed out, they don't know the person they're interacting with personally because they aren't the clerk at a small town store. They work in a larger city where they will meet folks they will literally never see again their entire lives, or in a call center where they may be talking to people from across the country. They normally are treated like easily-replaceable cogs by their employer, so they will treat the customers the same way, because they are just as replaceable for larger businesses. The loss of a single customer isn't going to show up on the SEC filings. With people being micro-managed and time-audited like they are machines it's no wonder they will see the people they interact with like they would a part on a conveyor belt among a hundred others.
Add to this they normally do not benefit from the difference between a "great" interaction, and a "good enough" interaction. "Going the extra mile" is something that usually only lines the pockets of the people higher up with repeat business from the customer, and when they encourage their employees to go the extra mile on every interaction, it stops being truly "extra" and just becomes another way of saying "work harder for the same pay".
They could have called it the "Web Accessibility Standards Project" very easily. Except people would have assumed it dealt with vision or motor-impaired navigation of the web, not accessibility in relation to standards compliance on browsers so they can all use the web page equally.
Eventually, the folks working at Valve will end up getting married, buying houses, having kids, etc. etc. and will realize that their income in this communal culture is hardly enough. At that time, they will either leave for other (traditional) companies where performance is rewarded with better pay and better positions,
If this is truly just about the money what's to stop Valve from giving bonuses based on merit or incremental pay increases for seniority? Experience is worth money, too. It's not a requirement they have to move up into any sort of supervisory position to be rewarded financially for working hard and showing dedication to their company. The idea that everyone in a certain position should be paid the same range is very hierarchical itself. I suspect it was formed by the same middle-management types getting butt-hurt over the idea that someone in a position "below" them was making more money than they were, completely ignoring whether the engineers have to work harder or make a greater or less contribution to the company overall.
I think a large part of society's ills could be cured with something akin to a basic income that basically pensions off people who don't want to be there so that those of us who do - who are highly motivated and capable - can get on with things. Let the manager who wants to spend all day fishing do exactly that. I want to spend all day building robots and educating students. The work will get done, and our industrial processes can produce enough for everyone.
Don't we already have this? It sounds like welfare. And like welfare, it doesn't really work without consumer price controls in place. Otherwise the consumer price index is distorted by the incomes of all the people who do work and soon the "basic income" isn't enough to really live on anymore. Same reason raising the minimum wage usually doesn't have the effect it should. The marketplace is set up to put most people a little into debt, but not enough they just plain can't make it and the system collapses from prices being truly too high to afford. When the wages go up the price of basic necessities is raised to gobble up this extra income so no one really gets ahead from the new wages like they were supposed to.
I suspect he is also trying to say that the police and DA offices are having a difficult time keeping up with the advances in technology.
I suspect he's making the case for legislation giving him broader access to online activity inquiries and surveillance without judicial oversight.
Nothing to see here, just law enforcement asking for their magic network backdoor again. I'm sure the "stop child pornography" argument will be making its appearance soon.
What bothers me is this "200 unread emails" bit. If these are work-related emails, why aren't you reading them? If they aren't, why do you have you personal email open when you're supposed to be working?
It sounds like you're using a single machine to do both work and personal stuff. Set up a second user account for work. Don't keep bookmarks to Slashdot, eBay, etc on your browser on the work user account. Don't set up your personal email on Outlook. If you install games on your computer do it from the "personal" user account side and set it to only be accessible for your user account so it's not tempting you from the Start menu on the Work side.
To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not. As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.
You can say that now. But a couple more buyouts/mergers and there wont be anyone else.
It's not ironic. The very reason they bundle the channels is because they have to buy them in bundles as well.
What would the alternative be? Offer people a la carte and have to pay for a bunch of channels nobody wants to subscribe to? They'd have to charge a higher costs for the channels people do subscribe to in order to pay the bundled station pricing from the providers. Then they'd simply look like they were offering less TV for more money. Their competitors would trumpet how few stations you get for $X. Of course, the rub would be that the 50 extra channels you got with the competition are ones you don't want to see anyway. In TV it's about quantity, not quality. Which is how we got in this mess anyway -- people bragging about how many channels they have and not caring at all that most of the time on those new channels was reruns and just plain bad shows.
Online gambling (with maybe the exception of a couple of states) has never been illegal in the US. However, it IS illegal for US banks to do business with online casinos under a law passed nearly ten years ago. That's a federal law that hasn't been repealed, so how are people supposed to deposit money in accounts with these Jersey casinos?
Easy. The banks do business with the actual Jersey brick and mortar casino, which then transfers the money to the online casino (taking their small cut along the way). That's the whole reason the Atlantic City casinos are partnering with the foreign online casinos to start with, instead of wanting to take advantage of the lockout on the foreign groups and having the entire U.S. online gambling market to divide up with the Nevada and Delaware operators.
It could just as likely be YOUR site that was compromised, and they found the address in something they sent to you, or some key logger in a coffee shop where you logged on.
Make sure you are outside of your pristine glass house before you start throwing stones.
This is incredibly easy to check. If it was local compromise, all addresses would be compromised, not just the one assigned to a particular company. Spam and viruses should be be pouring in to many many addresses. If it was just a single address assigned to a single company then you be pretty sure that it was their system compromised and not yours.
Unless the spammers know that he knows that he only gave the address to one company, so they only used one of the many addresses they harvested to spam him, casting suspicion on that company so he wont think to check his own PC, allowing them to collect a nice list of other email addresses from people he is affiliated with. That way, they get 100 addresses from 100 people, instead of 100 addresses from one guy with his own domain./paranoia
Those are offices owned by those companies, which is not what we're talking about. The grandparent poster is referring to an independent place for "people to share" where anyone can have access to the hardware and network infrastructure needed to telecommute. Think of the old computer labs Kinko's used to run where you could sit down at a machine with a full Microsoft Office suite and Adobe Creative apps, have access to a good flatbed scanner (with transparency adapter), B&W or color laser printing (charged by the page), removable storage drives (this was the '90s, Zip was everywhere) and Internet access and work for $10/hour (tallied by the minute). Only here you'd have VoIP phone connectivity and other software available.
But this isn't going to work because often the systems one uses at their jobs are dependent on software that has to be installed in a way that's not portable, or specialized, or proprietary in some way where it's not going to be on a common "telecommuting" machine image. There's a reason so many people have a dedicated "work PC" at home when they telecommute, and that because to keep this software running reliably the workplace IT needs to have control over what's on the computer at the hardware level and it wont play nice if it's running on a machine that has normal consumer software and utilities on it (like a personal machine) or who knows what the heck else if it was an all purpose "telecommuting" machine set up to allow a wide variety of people to work.
The closest you could get to this would require the employee to bring a virtual machine image on an external drive to and from the telecommuting place every day, and even then there could be issues with the hardware it's running on, or what visualization software platform is running, or applications that plain don't work well running virtualized. And after all that, you still have the security issues I mentioned. It's all more trouble than it's worth for most companies when they can just issue an official office machine to a telecommuter and have them use their own Internet service, or say "No telecommuting. Get you own ass in here if you want to work".
They already have those: They're called outsourced call centers.
I know what you're describing is a place where people work on an individual basis, the issue is that often the telecommuting environments have specific software or hardware requirements to work properly. It's not a case where you can just sit down to any Internet-connected PC and work remotely. Remote Desktop connections do not suit all software programs, and there's still the question of security.
Working at an anonymous location like this, how do you know the network infrastructure of the "telecommuting center" isn't capturing keystrokes or taking screenshots of the machines your remote employee is on? Not to mention, you competitor could have people working in the same center eavesdropping on your employees or otherwise obtaining proprietary information. You mention cameras to remotely observe employees, who has control of those cameras? Who has access to the feeds. You're going to potentially have several companies all wanting access to them to monitor their own employees not having access to look at yours as well.
A regular outsourced call center situation has contracts and NDA agreements protecting the client company. You situation would require too much administration to make it really work.
Industrial oversight is not intuitive to new industrial booms, because the short term profit will always outweigh the long term unseen consequences until they come to light.
Unseen consequences? If this was still the 1800's and science was less advanced it would be excusable, but this is the 21st century and the effects of the industrial revolutions of the U.S. and Europe and the environmental problems they caused are known history now. Did China think that if they took a similar path they would magically be exempt from the same problems? No, they knew what would happen. The Party simply chose to ignore it to see how far they could raise themselves before they started killing off a large enough portion on their peasants that it became a political issue.
They could have demonstrated a little smart growth by outlawing these chemicals and practices at the very birth of these industries so there were no bad habits to undo. But the government realizes that being environmentally conscious is economically less efficient.
Why hire the top X candidates? Just hire X good enough candidates for these jobs.
Even the college graduate candidates are only "good enough" half the time, so I don't see a college degree (or lack thereof) as really proving one's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, but it's not unreasonable that troubled companies need all hands on deck while at their most vulnerable.
If the person's job can be accomplished from home to begin with, what are they gaining from having them suddenly come into the office? "All hands on deck" doesn't require a physical set of hands if they didn't need them before.
I'm sick and tired of automatic systems that say "please be sure to listen to all of the following options as our menu has been changed". As a rule, they never give you a date when the menu has been changed, so this statement seems to typically be a lie used as an excuse to convince people to listen to the options every time.
The reason they want you to listen to all the options isn't because they change often. It's because too many people will push the first option they hear that vaguely sounds like it relates to what they need help with, when there was a later option that they needed to choose but didn't because they never hear it.
And this is ignoring all the people who just keep hitting "1" on their phones trying to get out of the IVR and reach someone as quickly as possible, only to find they are in the entirely wrong department when someone does answer and then getting angry at the representative.
Apparently 3/3s also don't like paying more for a better hotel that actually pays enough to attract intelligent people to run their front desk.
Why would an intelligent person want to waste their life away behind a hotel front desk?
I would be surprised if someone working a supermarket checkout job could afford to feed a family on that pay. Paying rent is probably a major hurdle itself. Probably one reason employers like that prefer high school/college kids. Besides being more biddable to crazy schedules and no benefits, the job is generally not needed to pay actual living expenses, so they'll accept what is below a "living wage" in the area.
Now, mind you, if more companies were intentionally hiring employees who show genuine customer focused attitudes -- for example, in the same fashion as the folks running Chick-fil-a seem to have done -- then the pendulum might start swinging back the other way. In the absence of that, I'll go to the kiosk at every opportunity.
There aren't really "genuine" customer focused attitudes, because the people in these roles don't have a reason to care. As you already pointed out, they don't know the person they're interacting with personally because they aren't the clerk at a small town store. They work in a larger city where they will meet folks they will literally never see again their entire lives, or in a call center where they may be talking to people from across the country. They normally are treated like easily-replaceable cogs by their employer, so they will treat the customers the same way, because they are just as replaceable for larger businesses. The loss of a single customer isn't going to show up on the SEC filings. With people being micro-managed and time-audited like they are machines it's no wonder they will see the people they interact with like they would a part on a conveyor belt among a hundred others.
Add to this they normally do not benefit from the difference between a "great" interaction, and a "good enough" interaction. "Going the extra mile" is something that usually only lines the pockets of the people higher up with repeat business from the customer, and when they encourage their employees to go the extra mile on every interaction, it stops being truly "extra" and just becomes another way of saying "work harder for the same pay".
BPI (British Pornographic Industry)
Oho. Your joke would be so funny... if that's what TFA actually said.
They could have called it the "Web Accessibility Standards Project" very easily.
Except people would have assumed it dealt with vision or motor-impaired navigation of the web, not accessibility in relation to standards compliance on browsers so they can all use the web page equally.
Eventually, the folks working at Valve will end up getting married, buying houses, having kids, etc. etc. and will realize that their income in this communal culture is hardly enough. At that time, they will either leave for other (traditional) companies where performance is rewarded with better pay and better positions,
If this is truly just about the money what's to stop Valve from giving bonuses based on merit or incremental pay increases for seniority? Experience is worth money, too. It's not a requirement they have to move up into any sort of supervisory position to be rewarded financially for working hard and showing dedication to their company. The idea that everyone in a certain position should be paid the same range is very hierarchical itself. I suspect it was formed by the same middle-management types getting butt-hurt over the idea that someone in a position "below" them was making more money than they were, completely ignoring whether the engineers have to work harder or make a greater or less contribution to the company overall.
I think a large part of society's ills could be cured with something akin to a basic income that basically pensions off people who don't want to be there so that those of us who do - who are highly motivated and capable - can get on with things. Let the manager who wants to spend all day fishing do exactly that. I want to spend all day building robots and educating students. The work will get done, and our industrial processes can produce enough for everyone.
Don't we already have this? It sounds like welfare. And like welfare, it doesn't really work without consumer price controls in place. Otherwise the consumer price index is distorted by the incomes of all the people who do work and soon the "basic income" isn't enough to really live on anymore. Same reason raising the minimum wage usually doesn't have the effect it should. The marketplace is set up to put most people a little into debt, but not enough they just plain can't make it and the system collapses from prices being truly too high to afford. When the wages go up the price of basic necessities is raised to gobble up this extra income so no one really gets ahead from the new wages like they were supposed to.
I suspect he is also trying to say that the police and DA offices are having a difficult time keeping up with the advances in technology.
I suspect he's making the case for legislation giving him broader access to online activity inquiries and surveillance without judicial oversight.
Nothing to see here, just law enforcement asking for their magic network backdoor again. I'm sure the "stop child pornography" argument will be making its appearance soon.
What bothers me is this "200 unread emails" bit. If these are work-related emails, why aren't you reading them? If they aren't, why do you have you personal email open when you're supposed to be working?
It sounds like you're using a single machine to do both work and personal stuff.
Set up a second user account for work. Don't keep bookmarks to Slashdot, eBay, etc on your browser on the work user account. Don't set up your personal email on Outlook. If you install games on your computer do it from the "personal" user account side and set it to only be accessible for your user account so it's not tempting you from the Start menu on the Work side.
To all the whiny complainers above: they're free to decide what they want to sell or not.
As a customer, you can always choose to buy somewhere else if unhappy.
You can say that now. But a couple more buyouts/mergers and there wont be anyone else.
It's not ironic. The very reason they bundle the channels is because they have to buy them in bundles as well.
What would the alternative be? Offer people a la carte and have to pay for a bunch of channels nobody wants to subscribe to? They'd have to charge a higher costs for the channels people do subscribe to in order to pay the bundled station pricing from the providers. Then they'd simply look like they were offering less TV for more money. Their competitors would trumpet how few stations you get for $X. Of course, the rub would be that the 50 extra channels you got with the competition are ones you don't want to see anyway. In TV it's about quantity, not quality. Which is how we got in this mess anyway -- people bragging about how many channels they have and not caring at all that most of the time on those new channels was reruns and just plain bad shows.
Online gambling (with maybe the exception of a couple of states) has never been illegal in the US. However, it IS illegal for US banks to do business with online casinos under a law passed nearly ten years ago. That's a federal law that hasn't been repealed, so how are people supposed to deposit money in accounts with these Jersey casinos?
Easy. The banks do business with the actual Jersey brick and mortar casino, which then transfers the money to the online casino (taking their small cut along the way). That's the whole reason the Atlantic City casinos are partnering with the foreign online casinos to start with, instead of wanting to take advantage of the lockout on the foreign groups and having the entire U.S. online gambling market to divide up with the Nevada and Delaware operators.
Lots of the time, they are cross-referencing things in parallel, which is inconvenient on a single screen of that size.
My God, they were still using Windows 8 in the 24th century?
It could just as likely be YOUR site that was compromised, and they found the address in something they sent to you, or some key logger in a coffee shop where you logged on.
Make sure you are outside of your pristine glass house before you start throwing stones.
This is incredibly easy to check. If it was local compromise, all addresses would be compromised, not just the one assigned to a particular company. Spam and viruses should be be pouring in to many many addresses. If it was just a single address assigned to a single company then you be pretty sure that it was their system compromised and not yours.
Unless the spammers know that he knows that he only gave the address to one company, so they only used one of the many addresses they harvested to spam him, casting suspicion on that company so he wont think to check his own PC, allowing them to collect a nice list of other email addresses from people he is affiliated with. That way, they get 100 addresses from 100 people, instead of 100 addresses from one guy with his own domain. /paranoia
Those are offices owned by those companies, which is not what we're talking about. The grandparent poster is referring to an independent place for "people to share" where anyone can have access to the hardware and network infrastructure needed to telecommute. Think of the old computer labs Kinko's used to run where you could sit down at a machine with a full Microsoft Office suite and Adobe Creative apps, have access to a good flatbed scanner (with transparency adapter), B&W or color laser printing (charged by the page), removable storage drives (this was the '90s, Zip was everywhere) and Internet access and work for $10/hour (tallied by the minute). Only here you'd have VoIP phone connectivity and other software available.
But this isn't going to work because often the systems one uses at their jobs are dependent on software that has to be installed in a way that's not portable, or specialized, or proprietary in some way where it's not going to be on a common "telecommuting" machine image. There's a reason so many people have a dedicated "work PC" at home when they telecommute, and that because to keep this software running reliably the workplace IT needs to have control over what's on the computer at the hardware level and it wont play nice if it's running on a machine that has normal consumer software and utilities on it (like a personal machine) or who knows what the heck else if it was an all purpose "telecommuting" machine set up to allow a wide variety of people to work.
The closest you could get to this would require the employee to bring a virtual machine image on an external drive to and from the telecommuting place every day, and even then there could be issues with the hardware it's running on, or what visualization software platform is running, or applications that plain don't work well running virtualized. And after all that, you still have the security issues I mentioned. It's all more trouble than it's worth for most companies when they can just issue an official office machine to a telecommuter and have them use their own Internet service, or say "No telecommuting. Get you own ass in here if you want to work".
They already have those: They're called outsourced call centers.
I know what you're describing is a place where people work on an individual basis, the issue is that often the telecommuting environments have specific software or hardware requirements to work properly. It's not a case where you can just sit down to any Internet-connected PC and work remotely. Remote Desktop connections do not suit all software programs, and there's still the question of security.
Working at an anonymous location like this, how do you know the network infrastructure of the "telecommuting center" isn't capturing keystrokes or taking screenshots of the machines your remote employee is on? Not to mention, you competitor could have people working in the same center eavesdropping on your employees or otherwise obtaining proprietary information. You mention cameras to remotely observe employees, who has control of those cameras? Who has access to the feeds. You're going to potentially have several companies all wanting access to them to monitor their own employees not having access to look at yours as well.
A regular outsourced call center situation has contracts and NDA agreements protecting the client company. You situation would require too much administration to make it really work.
Right. Why do summary writers always try to force the story toward their pet peeve.
Because oftentimes their personal grudge against the company is the only reason they take the time to write up a story and submit it.
Industrial oversight is not intuitive to new industrial booms, because the short term profit will always outweigh the long term unseen consequences until they come to light.
Unseen consequences? If this was still the 1800's and science was less advanced it would be excusable, but this is the 21st century and the effects of the industrial revolutions of the U.S. and Europe and the environmental problems they caused are known history now. Did China think that if they took a similar path they would magically be exempt from the same problems? No, they knew what would happen. The Party simply chose to ignore it to see how far they could raise themselves before they started killing off a large enough portion on their peasants that it became a political issue.
They could have demonstrated a little smart growth by outlawing these chemicals and practices at the very birth of these industries so there were no bad habits to undo. But the government realizes that being environmentally conscious is economically less efficient.
Making tracking mandatory is unnecessary.
So is the DHS, but I don't see the government passing up a power grab when the opportunity shows itself.
... but you wont get one.
The insurance industry lobby and DHS will see to that.
Why hire the top X candidates? Just hire X good enough candidates for these jobs.
Even the college graduate candidates are only "good enough" half the time, so I don't see a college degree (or lack thereof) as really proving one's worth.
Wheezy was George Jefferson's wife on the Jeffersons.
Of course.
With these new features who can't say the Debian Installer isn't "movin' on up"?
It's not a noteworthy study, and I'm wondering why I wasted my time reading about it.
Because you didn't do enough surfing to find the superior time-wasting content that was only a click (or 18!) away?