Agreed on the work is killing life point. I've told companies that I wasn't interested in the middle of the interview when they stated that I would be expected to be in the office 70hrs a week and be on call 24/7.
The qestion I have come to dread is "how passionate are you about your job?" which seems to be a thinly veiled way to say that they're looking for someone who works 70+ hours a week and be on call 24/7.
On a completely unrelated note, I have to say that I love your sig.
I know they're flukes. Most of my aunts, uncles, etc are either managers or owned their own businesses. My generation? We're mostly engineers (One of my cousins is a rather gifted business person, and another is a chef, but most of us are engineers). I get to see a lot of how things impact the bottom line.
I think my "favorite" part of the job that I mentioned before was that, if a staff member came to him with a complaint about one of the people under him, it was automatically the fault of the tech in his eyes no matter the actual circumstances. There was one case where the directors actually stepped in and blocked the decision to fire one of the team because they knew how childish the whole thing was.
I went to bat for the the team more than he did.
Incidentally, the person to make that complaint was a real problem person and was later let go for various reasons.
The other bad thing about IT managers is that, by and large from what I have seen, they tend to be intimidated by and fearful of anyone in their team that may have better leadership qualities than they do.
One of them went so far as to declare that *he* was the only one that should be giving any orders or instructions at all. Not that his orders trumped any other, but that he was the only one that was even allowed to give out assignments or directions. Kind of made my position as a "Lead" worthless until I managed to convince the people that worked with me that they wanted to listen to what I had to say.
Getting things done in spite of management is not how things are supposed to be. Unfortunately, it seems like it ends up that way far too often.
Granted, not everyone is as bad as he was, but I tend to use that as my prime example of bad management. I've seen good managers in tech manager positions as well, but they seem to be rather rare.
Bashing out that first year's code in the "free time" I had between a very full lode of classes, Chem labs, 1:45+ of travel every day, and a part time job?
Not as easy as you might think. My schedule for most of college was 70-80+ hours a week and that was just classes, work, and travel. I didn't get to sleep a whole lot.
He seems to be a portion of the segment of the Linux community that I have to resist throttling when I meet them in person.
I also have had to call support lines before (and not always MS's) for strange problems that we had at the non-profit I worked at a few years ago. We worked with a lot of specialized programs that, shall we say, had some real issues with our switch to XP when we rolled out new desktop machines. So bad, in fact, that we were reinstalling all of the new machines with Win2k for several months until the companies who made the software figured out what the problems were and fixed them. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to work.
We're not even going to get into the server issues. Some of those were grand fun and took entire days to figure out and I am a loooong way from being an idiot.
For what it's worth, good luck in learning Linux. Some parts are easy, some aren't (just like any other OS). The ability to code little scripts to automate things is nice, but that doesn't help your end users a whole lot (though most end users don't need to worry about it anyway). My best advice to you would be to find the local Linux User's Group and start talking to them and going to meetings while playing around with things on a personal machine. Eventually you'll pick things up.
There's a bit of a difference between finding differences in two different versions of the same operating system (unless you want to start doing the IBM vs MS DOS debate) on the same machine and finding the differences between two completely different operating systems.
For what it's worth, at 10 I was dealing with both Tandy CoCos (school and home) and my aunt's IMB clone and I saw quite a bit of difference between the two both hardware wise and what I could do.
Not to mention that students do sometimes transfer in from another university (and don't have to start all the way back at the beginning) or are allowed to skip out of the extremely early classes because of previous experience or AP classes (I don't know about everyone, but my advisor was trying to convince me to skip the intro class because of past experience).
I can see it now - "Um... Sir? What project that I've been working on for the last year? I just transfered here..."
Farming out the easy stuff frees me up to pursue the more lucrative stuff, like working more with customers or developing partnerships.
The problem with farming out the "easy stuff" is that is what most entry level people cut their teeth on out in the business world. If you take away the things that the entry level people are qualified to do, they never get the chance to become senior level.
With that simple move, you've cut the legs out from under your technical competence as a society and are now at the mercy of others. This, by the way, is a great way to cause an economic collapse and possibly another depression.
My girlfriend has declared that the Pong scarf is her favorite out of the ones for sale.
I don't really do scarves (the only one that I use is a midnight blue fleece one and it has to be really cold before I pull it out), but I thought the project was pretty cool. She, on the other hand, has the doctor who scarf. It has to be something like 6-8' long and she has jokingly worn it around the house like a dress before.
That's not that difficult, really. My ex was a model and I was occasionally backstage. All it takes is decent self control.
Most of the models there liked me because I was cool about all of it, and because I can actually have a conversation (you'd be amazed at how many of them were just doing it to work their way through school).
Businesses pay to be in the *yellow pages*. They do not, however, pay to be listed in the white pages (which every business and individual is listen in unless they make their number unlisted).
I always hear "who'd want to play those old games" from people who are only in their teenage years now (and generally the 14 and under crowd are the worst). I think it's because they never played the older console games when they came out, so they expect the gaming world to be all whiz bang graphics and require fast twitch reflexes.
I'm only 26, so I'm not old by any stretch, but I still tend to prefer the older console games because they didn't require 30+ hours of playing. They were fun, and that's what matters.
Heck, to be honest, I think the older RPG games on the console were better than most of the new ones because they were actually RPG's rather than a 3D platformer that sort of tries to pretend it's an RPG like the more recent Final Fantasy games.
Wow. According to Wikipeida, they're in their 18th season (the program began in 1992 and had two seasons in '02, '04, and '06) and Season 4 was London.
That's a show that I haven't thought about in quite a while. It amused me for part of one season when I was a teenager, but then it just got old.
Why would you want something with less utility for the same price?
Let's see. My off-the-top-of-my-head list up to this point - * One more set of buttons to worry about pushing at the wrong time * The camera likely draws power that I want to use for actually using the phone (I like having a long battery life as there are some days that I end up having to spend 4 hours on the phone). Even if it doesn't unless active, refer back to point 1. * I have, on occasion, been in locations where I needed my phone, but, thanks to security measures, cameras were forbidden.
I also have to ask who in the nine hells needs a remote for a car stereo. If I need to do something that I can't accomplish without looking then I wait until I have reason to stop. As for the people that may be behind me, they don't need to be fiddling with the bloody thing.
While that can work with a web-based program/service, something as large as an OS which has to be installed on your computer is a completely different story.
In order to properly set up a windows box with all of the programs I want and the settings I prefer takes about a day. That's not something I want to do once a week/month/quarter.
In the end, I picked out the Sanyo VI-2300. It's a fairly simple phone. Folds closed like my old one so I don't have to worry about "butt dial" and the battery lasts something on the order of 4+ hours. It has options for things like their wireless web browsing, but I turned that off.
I have a couple of complaints about it, though. I want to be able to turn down the ringer volume without opening the phone, and I hate the click wheel. The small joystick on my previous phone was much easier to use without looking - not to mention more responsive.
How many of you have actually "dialed" a phone (and I don't mean pushing buttons)? The last rotary phone I had died around 1994 or so. Heck, the town I grew up in didn't get tone dialing until pretty late in the game and neither did a lot of the smaller towns in the country.
Given that, I'd say there are a fair number of us that have dialed a phone since, despite how it seems at times, not all of us are under 14.
I went to change my plan a few months ago, and got my new free phone to go with it (the old one was a few years old- so old in fact, that they didn't have a data cable for it anymore so I had to manually re-enter all of my numbers into the new phone). The girl behind the counter commented on the fact that they had free camera phones as well and looked at me strangely when I told her that I just wanted a phone and not a camera.
I honestly want to know what's so bad about having a partner who honestly enjoys sex.
All of mine have (I'm not married. I was close once, but sometimes things happen) and I view it as a positive thing. Now, if that's the only thing they enjoy, then yes, that's not good, but most people have other things that they like to do as well.
I hate those ads. It makes me want to beat the person who came up with them senseless.
they're desperately screaming "oh, look at us. we're different!" but this makes sense from a company that has chosen to offer MySpace mobile right out of the box.
That's part of the reason that I liked my old ISP. Pretty much everyone who worked there from the owner down knew me socially (in fact, I was invited to basically all of the company parties as well) and knew what I did for a living.
If I called, they took it seriously and the problem was resolved about as quick as possible. It was a nice thing.
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Agreed on the work is killing life point. I've told companies that I wasn't interested in the middle of the interview when they stated that I would be expected to be in the office 70hrs a week and be on call 24/7.
The qestion I have come to dread is "how passionate are you about your job?" which seems to be a thinly veiled way to say that they're looking for someone who works 70+ hours a week and be on call 24/7.
On a completely unrelated note, I have to say that I love your sig.
I know they're flukes. Most of my aunts, uncles, etc are either managers or owned their own businesses. My generation? We're mostly engineers (One of my cousins is a rather gifted business person, and another is a chef, but most of us are engineers). I get to see a lot of how things impact the bottom line.
I think my "favorite" part of the job that I mentioned before was that, if a staff member came to him with a complaint about one of the people under him, it was automatically the fault of the tech in his eyes no matter the actual circumstances. There was one case where the directors actually stepped in and blocked the decision to fire one of the team because they knew how childish the whole thing was.
I went to bat for the the team more than he did.
Incidentally, the person to make that complaint was a real problem person and was later let go for various reasons.
The other bad thing about IT managers is that, by and large from what I have seen, they tend to be intimidated by and fearful of anyone in their team that may have better leadership qualities than they do.
One of them went so far as to declare that *he* was the only one that should be giving any orders or instructions at all. Not that his orders trumped any other, but that he was the only one that was even allowed to give out assignments or directions. Kind of made my position as a "Lead" worthless until I managed to convince the people that worked with me that they wanted to listen to what I had to say.
Getting things done in spite of management is not how things are supposed to be. Unfortunately, it seems like it ends up that way far too often.
Granted, not everyone is as bad as he was, but I tend to use that as my prime example of bad management. I've seen good managers in tech manager positions as well, but they seem to be rather rare.
Actually, I caught that just as I hit submit. It's one of the downsides to multi-tasking.
Nice try at a troll though.
Bashing out that first year's code in the "free time" I had between a very full lode of classes, Chem labs, 1:45+ of travel every day, and a part time job?
Not as easy as you might think. My schedule for most of college was 70-80+ hours a week and that was just classes, work, and travel. I didn't get to sleep a whole lot.
He seems to be a portion of the segment of the Linux community that I have to resist throttling when I meet them in person.
I also have had to call support lines before (and not always MS's) for strange problems that we had at the non-profit I worked at a few years ago. We worked with a lot of specialized programs that, shall we say, had some real issues with our switch to XP when we rolled out new desktop machines. So bad, in fact, that we were reinstalling all of the new machines with Win2k for several months until the companies who made the software figured out what the problems were and fixed them. Otherwise, we wouldn't have been able to work.
We're not even going to get into the server issues. Some of those were grand fun and took entire days to figure out and I am a loooong way from being an idiot.
For what it's worth, good luck in learning Linux. Some parts are easy, some aren't (just like any other OS). The ability to code little scripts to automate things is nice, but that doesn't help your end users a whole lot (though most end users don't need to worry about it anyway). My best advice to you would be to find the local Linux User's Group and start talking to them and going to meetings while playing around with things on a personal machine. Eventually you'll pick things up.
There's a bit of a difference between finding differences in two different versions of the same operating system (unless you want to start doing the IBM vs MS DOS debate) on the same machine and finding the differences between two completely different operating systems.
For what it's worth, at 10 I was dealing with both Tandy CoCos (school and home) and my aunt's IMB clone and I saw quite a bit of difference between the two both hardware wise and what I could do.
Not to mention that students do sometimes transfer in from another university (and don't have to start all the way back at the beginning) or are allowed to skip out of the extremely early classes because of previous experience or AP classes (I don't know about everyone, but my advisor was trying to convince me to skip the intro class because of past experience).
I can see it now - "Um... Sir? What project that I've been working on for the last year? I just transfered here..."
Farming out the easy stuff frees me up to pursue the more lucrative stuff, like working more with customers or developing partnerships.
The problem with farming out the "easy stuff" is that is what most entry level people cut their teeth on out in the business world. If you take away the things that the entry level people are qualified to do, they never get the chance to become senior level.
With that simple move, you've cut the legs out from under your technical competence as a society and are now at the mercy of others. This, by the way, is a great way to cause an economic collapse and possibly another depression.
My girlfriend has declared that the Pong scarf is her favorite out of the ones for sale.
I don't really do scarves (the only one that I use is a midnight blue fleece one and it has to be really cold before I pull it out), but I thought the project was pretty cool. She, on the other hand, has the doctor who scarf. It has to be something like 6-8' long and she has jokingly worn it around the house like a dress before.
That's not that difficult, really. My ex was a model and I was occasionally backstage. All it takes is decent self control.
Most of the models there liked me because I was cool about all of it, and because I can actually have a conversation (you'd be amazed at how many of them were just doing it to work their way through school).
I still joke about body tape and butt glue.
Businesses pay to be in the *yellow pages*. They do not, however, pay to be listed in the white pages (which every business and individual is listen in unless they make their number unlisted).
I always hear "who'd want to play those old games" from people who are only in their teenage years now (and generally the 14 and under crowd are the worst). I think it's because they never played the older console games when they came out, so they expect the gaming world to be all whiz bang graphics and require fast twitch reflexes.
I'm only 26, so I'm not old by any stretch, but I still tend to prefer the older console games because they didn't require 30+ hours of playing. They were fun, and that's what matters.
Heck, to be honest, I think the older RPG games on the console were better than most of the new ones because they were actually RPG's rather than a 3D platformer that sort of tries to pretend it's an RPG like the more recent Final Fantasy games.
Don't forget the push that he and his company constantly make for things like removal of the cap on H1B's.
There's no way that he'd get my vote.
Wow. According to Wikipeida, they're in their 18th season (the program began in 1992 and had two seasons in '02, '04, and '06) and Season 4 was London.
That's a show that I haven't thought about in quite a while. It amused me for part of one season when I was a teenager, but then it just got old.
I must have had a teenager flashback.
I saw the words "Real World is completely suck in the UK" and my first thought was Damn, MTV must be getting *really* desperate...
You made me laugh. Thank you. =]
Why would you want something with less utility for the same price?
Let's see. My off-the-top-of-my-head list up to this point -
* One more set of buttons to worry about pushing at the wrong time
* The camera likely draws power that I want to use for actually using the phone (I like having a long battery life as there are some days that I end up having to spend 4 hours on the phone). Even if it doesn't unless active, refer back to point 1.
* I have, on occasion, been in locations where I needed my phone, but, thanks to security measures, cameras were forbidden.
I also have to ask who in the nine hells needs a remote for a car stereo. If I need to do something that I can't accomplish without looking then I wait until I have reason to stop. As for the people that may be behind me, they don't need to be fiddling with the bloody thing.
While that can work with a web-based program/service, something as large as an OS which has to be installed on your computer is a completely different story.
In order to properly set up a windows box with all of the programs I want and the settings I prefer takes about a day. That's not something I want to do once a week/month/quarter.
In the end, I picked out the Sanyo VI-2300. It's a fairly simple phone. Folds closed like my old one so I don't have to worry about "butt dial" and the battery lasts something on the order of 4+ hours. It has options for things like their wireless web browsing, but I turned that off.
I have a couple of complaints about it, though. I want to be able to turn down the ringer volume without opening the phone, and I hate the click wheel. The small joystick on my previous phone was much easier to use without looking - not to mention more responsive.
How many of you have actually "dialed" a phone (and I don't mean pushing buttons)?
The last rotary phone I had died around 1994 or so. Heck, the town I grew up in didn't get tone dialing until pretty late in the game and neither did a lot of the smaller towns in the country.
Given that, I'd say there are a fair number of us that have dialed a phone since, despite how it seems at times, not all of us are under 14.
Wow. I'm not the only one who had that moment?
I went to change my plan a few months ago, and got my new free phone to go with it (the old one was a few years old- so old in fact, that they didn't have a data cable for it anymore so I had to manually re-enter all of my numbers into the new phone). The girl behind the counter commented on the fact that they had free camera phones as well and looked at me strangely when I told her that I just wanted a phone and not a camera.
I honestly want to know what's so bad about having a partner who honestly enjoys sex.
All of mine have (I'm not married. I was close once, but sometimes things happen) and I view it as a positive thing. Now, if that's the only thing they enjoy, then yes, that's not good, but most people have other things that they like to do as well.
I hate those ads. It makes me want to beat the person who came up with them senseless.
they're desperately screaming "oh, look at us. we're different!" but this makes sense from a company that has chosen to offer MySpace mobile right out of the box.
That's part of the reason that I liked my old ISP. Pretty much everyone who worked there from the owner down knew me socially (in fact, I was invited to basically all of the company parties as well) and knew what I did for a living.
If I called, they took it seriously and the problem was resolved about as quick as possible. It was a nice thing.
"you live with your wife but you marry the company"
That's when you find a new job that is saner than that one and then tell your manager that you want a divorce.
I'm sorry, but there are more important things in life - like life. You can bet that the people who own the company are enjoying theirs.