Not to mention the fact that far too many employers have fairly extensive checks done on potential employees now.
That "harmless" video could impact your career for the rest of your life.
The fact that businesses need to realize that a person's personal life is just that - personal - and they have no business basing their hiring decisions on perfectly normal, legal activities that are done outside of the workplace is a whole other matter.
Remember, boys and girls, things on the internet never really go away.
As someone who is still early in their career, I have to admit that I jokingly answer the "what is your greatest weakness?" question in a way that throws a lot of people off guard for a moment.
My answer? My horribly debilitating fear of clowns. And interviews.
The frightening thing is just how many bad interviews I have been on. That's not to say that they've all been bad (Amazon's series of phone interviews wasn't bad at all), just that way too many of them are (even though you could say one is too many).
The one that comes to mind is the company that called me in for what turned out to be a group interview where I was the only full time candidate there among a group of potential interns. To top it off, the building was being expanded during that time, so there were jackhammers and their "new" C++ test was really written in C (and when I quite politely asked the dev manager why, I was curtly told that it didn't matter anyway because they were migrating everything to C# anyway).
The other great example was one where I was literally lied to about the position and the interviewers were borderline verbally abusive. Since it was a 3 hour drive from my house, instead of walking out, I decided to have a little fun with them and see just how bad it could get.
It led to my favorite interview question - "How would you use bash to scrub the carpet?"
I always kept business cards from the places I interviewed at, and after the first couple of bad interviews I started keeping notes on the back of the cards (good and bad) and have made them available to a lot of the people that I know in this field.
The really weird thing, though, is that all of the really bad ones seem to have one thing in common. It's only one half of the interview that's a nightmare. Either the HR people are sane (and even nice) and the tech people are *ahem* less than plesant, or the tech interviews are cool and HR is psychotic.
I have no idea why, but it seems to work out that way for some reason...
Sadly, there are a lot of really bad employers out there. I have had a couple of interviews where I didn't hear anything from them afterward even after a polite prod for information or if they did send any word, it was months later (at which point I had already written them off a long time ago).
Thankfully they seem to be the exception rather than the rule, but they do happen.
First off, I have to say that I really hate the mess of things that litigation happy people and a lot of HR people (not all of them by any stretch, but a lot of them) have made of interviews. One or two incidents occur to some other company, and HR at your company goes "just don't say anything and they can't sue us."
It's almost like saying "If my eyes are closed, you can't see me."
Personally, I think that's a bad practice, but I'm not in much of a position to change it.
Now that I have that out of the way, I just want to say that my comment wasn't just about providing meaningful feedback (which some of us ask for and honestly want), but also about his attitude of "anyone whom I don't deem worthy is not worth another second of my time."
That sort of attitude bleeds through into the interview and it really turns off potential candidates. As a result, they let their friends know (who, as I said, let theirs know, etc). Deapite what he seems to think as evidenced by his response, treating a person like a real person is not just for career councilors.
I've walked out of interviews at places where the technical people displayed the "I am god and you must impress me, pesant" mentality, because I don't want to work in that sort of an environment. I know a lot of other really competent people who have done the same.
You want your company to present a truly positive face to potential hires (and, as an interviewer, you *are* the face of the company to the people you are interviewing) because that is one of the things that make people *want* to work for you. If they're excited about the company, whether or not they got the job, they will tell other people.
In the end if you can make your potential hires excited about your company, you have a lot better chance of getting really solid, quality people even if you don't hire that particular person, because word of mouth is extremely important.
First off, once they're rejected there is zero reason to spend another second more on them.
That opinion is just plain wrongheaded, and I'll tell you why.
Even if the candidate doesn't get the job because they weren't qualified, you want them to be excited about the company. It's good PR for *you* and that most certainly is a good reason to treat your candidates respectfully.
If they still like your company even though they didn't get the job, they will direct other people they know to you (many of whom may be more skilled than the person you turned away), and they may even try again down the road when they have more experience themselves.
You may not realize this, but even developers and other technical people are social animals (no matter how much we sometimes deny it) and word gets around pretty fast. The bad companies get pointed out to friends who point them out to their friends (and on down the line). That's something we all know too well. However, the other case is also true - the GOOD companies get pointed out too.
Treat your candidates poorly (and treating them as a disposable commodity that doesn't deserve "another second more" is treating them poorly), and after a while, you will only get poor candidates.
Thought experiment: What if everyone subscribed to the Free Software movement? What if RMS had shown up a few years earlier and replaced BillG in history?
There would not be a real software business because most software that exists could not survive on support contracts or donations alone. There would also be a lot of stagnation becuase software would be "good enough" (when really it isn't a lot of the time) and there would be no real reason to come up with much in the way of new business or personal offerings.
The software business is about coming up with offerings that work well and are sustainable. Part of that means that the people who actually write it get paid so they can do things like live their lives. Making all software creation about a political ideal is a great way to kill it.
Like it or not, the Free Software movement feeds off of closed source software. People who write Free or Open Source software usually work somewhere else writing closed source software. They have to because the hobby doesn't generally pay worth a damn.
Yes, there are people who get paid to write Free and Open Source stuff, but there are not a whole heck of a lot of them out there compared to the rest of us.
Giving back to the community that taught you is a positive thing. It helps us teach new generations of people and let those that are less fortunate get their feet wet without having to sell their internal organs to buy things like compilers or word processors. However, expecting everyone to give everything they do is just dumb.
for the MtG geeks out there (I haven't played in years, but still) =]
Pillars of Creation Artifact Casting Cost: 3 1T: Sacrifice Pillars of Creation, put one Earth Token into play. Treat Earth Token as a land which produces either W, R, B, Bk, or G
You can't really use closed source, proprietary software, because the inevitable bugs will eventually bring it down, and the vendor will refuse to support you.
Funny. Millions of people use closed source, proprietary software every day. They've been doing it for a long time, and generally anymore by the time those problems arise, the people or company using it are ready to get a new [printer|computer|whatever] anyway.
Do I advocate open source software? yes. Do I use it? yes, but I also use closed source software as well. Do I think that everything has to be open source? hell no.
Your argument that you "can't really use" closed source software is silly.
And using powdered limestone in some industries in chemical reactions as a base is ridiculously inefficient, but they do it *because* it's simple, plentiful and cheap.
Sometimes the answer is not the most efficent solution, but the most expedient one. It all depends on your needs and your resources.
You never learned how to purify water using solar power?
Here's the short version: Take a large vat full of salt water, place a recepticle in the middle to catch the fresh water, cover over with clear object (preferably concave so the curvature can direct the condensed water toward the fresh water recepticle, and then let the sun do it's work. You periodically remove the fresh water and add more salt water.
In that case, should there be a catastrophy (fire that takes out the building, etc), you'd be dead in the water since your most recent backups available would be 6 months old.
Part of the game of backups is planning for the worst but hoping it doesn't happen. Make regular backups, send a copy offsite, and go on with life. That way, you aren't left going "oh crap" when your machine is torched.
First: They would have had probable cause to get a warrant to open the mail based on the suspicious outline.
Second: While in the military, you give up a great deal of your rights and it is quite likely that the mail could be opened without a warrant in his case.
Knowing the grandparent poster, I can say that you barely want to give her a normal cup of coffee on most days. You should have seen her after the two pots of tea she had with dinner on her birthday a few years back. The drive home with her nearly drove me crazy. With five demitasses of Turkish coffee, the molecules of her body would lose cohesion...
My standard for Turkish coffee (as well as the standard that some of my forigen friends have) is "can I stand a spoon up in it?" I blame them for my addiction to it. Man will that wake you up at 5 in the morning.
But then I'm also the guy that my early morning professors would hit up for chocolate covered espresso beans, because I always carried a tin of them with me.
No offense, man, but it sounds like you have a bit of maturing to do. Not all of us constantly want the chokingly sweet soda (and dislike the tase of artificial sweeteners). Similarly, not all of us do the things you listed in order to "keep up with the jonses"
SUV's - some of us actually use them for going a bit off the beaten path. Personally, I enjoy hiking, and I also need something to carry my training equipment in (which a standard car is not suited for). Nightclubs - socailizing is nice on occasion. Dancing is fun as well. Clothes - Granted, I tend to be more of a casual person, but I have an appreciation for nice clothing as well. I always had good taste and a sense of style. The fact that, for several years, I dated and was later engaged to a model didn't hurt me in the clothing area either.
However, it should also be mentioned that socializing is a good way to make contacts that can help you professionally as well. Bottom line - be yourself, enjoy your life, but don't assume that people who do things that you don't are doing them to keep up with the jonses.
So, if the coffee sucks, it's because they like it that way
Actually, a lot of people who constantly go to Starbucks do it because it's the cool thing to do. They do it because it's what everyone else is doing since they don't want to be left out. Starbucks is more about "brand" than coffee anymore.
I lean more toward tea anymore, but the cafe in question had really good coffee. I used to spend way too much time in there having coffee.
Then I discovered their hot chocolate...
I swear that they have to put drugs in the hot chocolate. Granted, I only see them put frothed milk and high quality chocolate syrup in it, but that doesn't mean it's any less addictive =]
If you're even in Athens, Ohio, I highly recommend stopping in there. The coffee's good, the hot chocolate is better, and the atmosphere is great (as evidenced by the fact that I spent more time in there working on programming projects my senior year than I did in the sun labs).
I think my main complaint about starbucks is the fact that they don't seem to know how to *not* burn their coffee beans.
I'm glad that they are relatively socaially concious, but my personal opinion is that their coffee sucks. When I was still on campus, I really prefered the one coffee shop off campus that was also all fair trade stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the fact that far too many employers have fairly extensive checks done on potential employees now.
That "harmless" video could impact your career for the rest of your life.
The fact that businesses need to realize that a person's personal life is just that - personal - and they have no business basing their hiring decisions on perfectly normal, legal activities that are done outside of the workplace is a whole other matter.
Remember, boys and girls, things on the internet never really go away.
As someone who is still early in their career, I have to admit that I jokingly answer the "what is your greatest weakness?" question in a way that throws a lot of people off guard for a moment.
My answer? My horribly debilitating fear of clowns. And interviews.
The question that I want to ask is "where are you an HR professional?" =]
It doesn't really have anything to do with the current conversation, I just want to know because I'm currently looking heh
The frightening thing is just how many bad interviews I have been on. That's not to say that they've all been bad (Amazon's series of phone interviews wasn't bad at all), just that way too many of them are (even though you could say one is too many).
The one that comes to mind is the company that called me in for what turned out to be a group interview where I was the only full time candidate there among a group of potential interns. To top it off, the building was being expanded during that time, so there were jackhammers and their "new" C++ test was really written in C (and when I quite politely asked the dev manager why, I was curtly told that it didn't matter anyway because they were migrating everything to C# anyway).
The other great example was one where I was literally lied to about the position and the interviewers were borderline verbally abusive. Since it was a 3 hour drive from my house, instead of walking out, I decided to have a little fun with them and see just how bad it could get.
It led to my favorite interview question - "How would you use bash to scrub the carpet?"
I always kept business cards from the places I interviewed at, and after the first couple of bad interviews I started keeping notes on the back of the cards (good and bad) and have made them available to a lot of the people that I know in this field.
The really weird thing, though, is that all of the really bad ones seem to have one thing in common. It's only one half of the interview that's a nightmare. Either the HR people are sane (and even nice) and the tech people are *ahem* less than plesant, or the tech interviews are cool and HR is psychotic.
I have no idea why, but it seems to work out that way for some reason...
Sadly, there are a lot of really bad employers out there. I have had a couple of interviews where I didn't hear anything from them afterward even after a polite prod for information or if they did send any word, it was months later (at which point I had already written them off a long time ago).
Thankfully they seem to be the exception rather than the rule, but they do happen.
First off, I have to say that I really hate the mess of things that litigation happy people and a lot of HR people (not all of them by any stretch, but a lot of them) have made of interviews. One or two incidents occur to some other company, and HR at your company goes "just don't say anything and they can't sue us."
It's almost like saying "If my eyes are closed, you can't see me."
Personally, I think that's a bad practice, but I'm not in much of a position to change it.
Now that I have that out of the way, I just want to say that my comment wasn't just about providing meaningful feedback (which some of us ask for and honestly want), but also about his attitude of "anyone whom I don't deem worthy is not worth another second of my time."
That sort of attitude bleeds through into the interview and it really turns off potential candidates. As a result, they let their friends know (who, as I said, let theirs know, etc). Deapite what he seems to think as evidenced by his response, treating a person like a real person is not just for career councilors.
I've walked out of interviews at places where the technical people displayed the "I am god and you must impress me, pesant" mentality, because I don't want to work in that sort of an environment. I know a lot of other really competent people who have done the same.
You want your company to present a truly positive face to potential hires (and, as an interviewer, you *are* the face of the company to the people you are interviewing) because that is one of the things that make people *want* to work for you. If they're excited about the company, whether or not they got the job, they will tell other people.
In the end if you can make your potential hires excited about your company, you have a lot better chance of getting really solid, quality people even if you don't hire that particular person, because word of mouth is extremely important.
Apparently you were never a Dukes of Hazard fan as a kid.
The number painted on the side of the General Lee was 01
First off, once they're rejected there is zero reason to spend another second more on them.
That opinion is just plain wrongheaded, and I'll tell you why.
Even if the candidate doesn't get the job because they weren't qualified, you want them to be excited about the company. It's good PR for *you* and that most certainly is a good reason to treat your candidates respectfully.
If they still like your company even though they didn't get the job, they will direct other people they know to you (many of whom may be more skilled than the person you turned away), and they may even try again down the road when they have more experience themselves.
You may not realize this, but even developers and other technical people are social animals (no matter how much we sometimes deny it) and word gets around pretty fast. The bad companies get pointed out to friends who point them out to their friends (and on down the line). That's something we all know too well. However, the other case is also true - the GOOD companies get pointed out too.
Treat your candidates poorly (and treating them as a disposable commodity that doesn't deserve "another second more" is treating them poorly), and after a while, you will only get poor candidates.
Thought experiment: What if everyone subscribed to the Free Software movement? What if RMS had shown up a few years earlier and replaced BillG in history?
There would not be a real software business because most software that exists could not survive on support contracts or donations alone. There would also be a lot of stagnation becuase software would be "good enough" (when really it isn't a lot of the time) and there would be no real reason to come up with much in the way of new business or personal offerings.
The software business is about coming up with offerings that work well and are sustainable. Part of that means that the people who actually write it get paid so they can do things like live their lives. Making all software creation about a political ideal is a great way to kill it.
Like it or not, the Free Software movement feeds off of closed source software. People who write Free or Open Source software usually work somewhere else writing closed source software. They have to because the hobby doesn't generally pay worth a damn.
Yes, there are people who get paid to write Free and Open Source stuff, but there are not a whole heck of a lot of them out there compared to the rest of us.
Giving back to the community that taught you is a positive thing. It helps us teach new generations of people and let those that are less fortunate get their feet wet without having to sell their internal organs to buy things like compilers or word processors. However, expecting everyone to give everything they do is just dumb.
Most of the ones I took to tournaments were either Bk&W or R&G.
Winning tournaments was basically the only way I could afford to keep playing. That was one expensive freaking hobby.
for the MtG geeks out there (I haven't played in years, but still) =]
Pillars of Creation
Artifact
Casting Cost: 3
1T: Sacrifice Pillars of Creation, put one Earth Token into play. Treat Earth Token as a land which produces either W, R, B, Bk, or G
You can't really use closed source, proprietary software, because the inevitable bugs will eventually bring it down, and the vendor will refuse to support you.
Funny. Millions of people use closed source, proprietary software every day. They've been doing it for a long time, and generally anymore by the time those problems arise, the people or company using it are ready to get a new [printer|computer|whatever] anyway.
Do I advocate open source software? yes. Do I use it? yes, but I also use closed source software as well. Do I think that everything has to be open source? hell no.
Your argument that you "can't really use" closed source software is silly.
Two of them were rainstorms that he got cought out in the middle of. =]
And using powdered limestone in some industries in chemical reactions as a base is ridiculously inefficient, but they do it *because* it's simple, plentiful and cheap.
Sometimes the answer is not the most efficent solution, but the most expedient one. It all depends on your needs and your resources.
You never learned how to purify water using solar power?
Here's the short version:
Take a large vat full of salt water, place a recepticle in the middle to catch the fresh water, cover over with clear object (preferably concave so the curvature can direct the condensed water toward the fresh water recepticle, and then let the sun do it's work. You periodically remove the fresh water and add more salt water.
In that case, should there be a catastrophy (fire that takes out the building, etc), you'd be dead in the water since your most recent backups available would be 6 months old.
Part of the game of backups is planning for the worst but hoping it doesn't happen. Make regular backups, send a copy offsite, and go on with life. That way, you aren't left going "oh crap" when your machine is torched.
First: They would have had probable cause to get a warrant to open the mail based on the suspicious outline.
Second: While in the military, you give up a great deal of your rights and it is quite likely that the mail could be opened without a warrant in his case.
I actually didn't look at the dept tag for the story. I generally don't.
Is it sad to say that was the exact quote I thought of when I saw this article?
Good grief...
Knowing the grandparent poster, I can say that you barely want to give her a normal cup of coffee on most days. You should have seen her after the two pots of tea she had with dinner on her birthday a few years back. The drive home with her nearly drove me crazy. With five demitasses of Turkish coffee, the molecules of her body would lose cohesion...
My standard for Turkish coffee (as well as the standard that some of my forigen friends have) is "can I stand a spoon up in it?" I blame them for my addiction to it. Man will that wake you up at 5 in the morning.
But then I'm also the guy that my early morning professors would hit up for chocolate covered espresso beans, because I always carried a tin of them with me.
Well, since he has cats, my guess would be the litterbox =]
No offense, man, but it sounds like you have a bit of maturing to do. Not all of us constantly want the chokingly sweet soda (and dislike the tase of artificial sweeteners). Similarly, not all of us do the things you listed in order to "keep up with the jonses"
SUV's - some of us actually use them for going a bit off the beaten path. Personally, I enjoy hiking, and I also need something to carry my training equipment in (which a standard car is not suited for).
Nightclubs - socailizing is nice on occasion. Dancing is fun as well.
Clothes - Granted, I tend to be more of a casual person, but I have an appreciation for nice clothing as well. I always had good taste and a sense of style. The fact that, for several years, I dated and was later engaged to a model didn't hurt me in the clothing area either.
However, it should also be mentioned that socializing is a good way to make contacts that can help you professionally as well. Bottom line - be yourself, enjoy your life, but don't assume that people who do things that you don't are doing them to keep up with the jonses.
So, if the coffee sucks, it's because they like it that way
Actually, a lot of people who constantly go to Starbucks do it because it's the cool thing to do. They do it because it's what everyone else is doing since they don't want to be left out. Starbucks is more about "brand" than coffee anymore.
I lean more toward tea anymore, but the cafe in question had really good coffee. I used to spend way too much time in there having coffee.
Then I discovered their hot chocolate...
I swear that they have to put drugs in the hot chocolate. Granted, I only see them put frothed milk and high quality chocolate syrup in it, but that doesn't mean it's any less addictive =]
If you're even in Athens, Ohio, I highly recommend stopping in there. The coffee's good, the hot chocolate is better, and the atmosphere is great (as evidenced by the fact that I spent more time in there working on programming projects my senior year than I did in the sun labs).
I think my main complaint about starbucks is the fact that they don't seem to know how to *not* burn their coffee beans.
I'm glad that they are relatively socaially concious, but my personal opinion is that their coffee sucks. When I was still on campus, I really prefered the one coffee shop off campus that was also all fair trade stuff.