It's a nice theory from a few large companies. I've been in the under $100M/year sector for 20+ years now. There are players (sorry, employees) at these companies who take home $200K->$5M/year, but none of them on the "Technical Track."
We in the Technical Track are the 98%, looking at the top 2%, I'm fairly certain I could do better - it's not my strength, my strength is technical, but I could (and have) done management better than most of the top 2% I know.
There is no such thing as a new star developer... if you've been around for a year or two and produced some good stuff that hasn't blown up in anyone's face, then you might start to ignite the internal fusion required for star power...
Depends what you are looking for. A competent cog in a machine? Then your method is probably best. (And I'm not knocking cogs, every business needs them.) But if you are looking for an idea person, maybe not so much.
I'm an idea person, I tend to be hired by idea people, too many idea people in an organization is not usually a good thing - I'd say you need at least 9 cogs for every idea.
At least there's not a rope hanging from the ceiling.
Depends on the shop, I've had at least one job where there was an obvious rope hanging from the ceiling, they promised to cut it down when I started, but they failed.
The best pile reduction technique I ever employed was the 2 degrees of separation method, only consider those applicants whose references include people you, or your colleagues, know personally - takes the average pile of resumes down from 500 to just a couple. Quick call to the references gives a go / no-go on the remainder.
Has worked well for me in the past, doesn't even begin to resemble fair, but what in this life does?
I mean 300 lines of beautiful C is all fine and dandy but if it took you 3 months to write it and half of it is cut and pasted from the web how good is it really?
3 months is on the slow side, but cut and pasted from the web is just as good as, if not better than, regurgitating it from old textbooks or imagination - as long as you're not running afoul of license issues.
If you're hiring a sales guy, your interview should test his persistence, resilience, likability, and perhaps ability to hold his liquor.
If you're hiring a customer service rep, your interview should test their patience, politeness, and thoroughness at collecting information.
If you're hiring an engineer, solving puzzles is part of the job, brain teasers are one quick way to gauge how a potential hire will respond to the kind of task the job requires.
As for hiring HR staff, I'm not really sure how to judge them, other than the fact that any good person I've ever encountered in HR didn't stay in the job for long.
This is 90% of the problem today with the elimination of the inheritance tax that the founding fathers instituted. They wanted to prohibit the creation of an aristocracy to prevent a plutocracy from taking over and ruining the representative democracy they envisioned.
Yeah, I think we've already fallen off that cliff edge, it will be a struggle to get back to that vision.
For a twist, let's say that Disney/Pixar is predictable, as an investor of capital, I can reasonably predict that $20M sunk into a Disney feature will result in reasonable return on investment.
While many independents may be as good or better than Disney, especially if given equal resources, they're not given equal resources because they are not as predictable, not as safe an investment of capital, so the predictable winner wins.
Same reason a second drug store pops up on the corner across from a successful one - it's a safe investment, God knows we can't actually spread the things around where they might be twice as convenient for the customers, that would present a risk for the investors, better to put them somewhere safely demonstrated to be profitable so that you don't risk as much.
If you had hundreds of millions to protect and pass on to your heirs, you'd be rigging the system to make it as predictable as possible for those assets to stay in your family's hands. God knows we can't trust the kids to get as lucky as we did in succeeding.
I run two eeeBox B202s at home, XP does well on a 1.6 single core Atom with 2 or even 1 GB of Ram- 7, I'm not so sure about, and I'm not ready to plunk down half of what I paid for the machine in the first place to find out.
They physically tested the phone at the equator and in Sweden and that was the only way they could figure out that the solar flux would be higher at the equator?
Like, someone couldn't sit down at a desk with a calculator and trig it out and find out how much exactly the phone would get at 50 degrees N latitude as opposed to 0?
Someone fucking hire me. I will figure this shit out for you. I won't even need to be flown out anywhere (though southern Italy would be nice). I'll just crunch out the numbers and they will be accurate and a lot faster than what Nokia got their results.
-- BMO
Somebody sat at a desk with a calculator and trig'ed it out long before people went on the road to do the testing. Being Nokia, they may have had people in the field who did not have to travel, or, they just sent the engineers on a perk trip to do ground truth.
It isn't really tested until you've done the ground truth.
Basically, meteor showers come at the same time every year, since this one is so "sharp," (8 hours of sparkles) it probably is only worth watching at a particular longitude every 4 years or so (as the Earth rotates 365.25 times around the sun...), but, if you're willing to travel for it, this meteor shower should hit on or about Jan 4 every year, as the Earth passes through the constellation Boötes.
But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.
This is the same schtick that came around after Nokia dropped Qt... I'd say it's armchair quarterbacking from people who don't really understand programming at all, sounds good in the executive boardroom during the "lessons learned" meeting, but is impossible to verify unless you're in the trenches, and I bet that in the trenches you can find all kinds of conflicting opinions about what went wrong.
Isn't a collusive action like this no better than the legislation these corporations are trying to stop? Blocking the internet is blocking the internet, regardless of who does it and why.
There's a difference between a protest a few hours long and a law that will change the landscape for decades to come.
Umm....you didn't read your quoted section entirely.
If I am a vendor and only accept credit and cash, I charge everyone the same amount, and give a cash discount. I have thus just charged a credit fee.
Incorrect. You are offering a "cash discount" which is, specifically, allowed by the credit card companies' agreements. You, however, must advertise the higher of the two prices as the price of the item in question. This has always been allowed. What you cannot do it advertise something for $3.99 and then try to charge somebody using a credit card a fee for using said card.
If you're going to be a credit card merchant, please at least know the rules.
Unless you're a gas station... literally thousands of gas stations in Florida advertise their cash / station-card price, then hit you for an additional 4-6 cents per gallon at the pump if you want to use your "normal" credit card. To which, I say, I get 12c per gallon back from my Visa card when I buy your gas, so take that, sucker.
I hope you're right. The processors in even a total homebrew have to come from somewhere and I can see the content providers requiring DRM being built right into the CPU.
They have teetered around getting Intel to do it, but it's a hard sell because that gives AMD an advantage, and, these days, you can do video media on ARM and any number of other architectures. Intel won't be giving up their market easily, and that's exactly what would happen if they became the MPAA's patsy before all their competition did.
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It's a nice theory from a few large companies. I've been in the under $100M/year sector for 20+ years now. There are players (sorry, employees) at these companies who take home $200K->$5M/year, but none of them on the "Technical Track."
We in the Technical Track are the 98%, looking at the top 2%, I'm fairly certain I could do better - it's not my strength, my strength is technical, but I could (and have) done management better than most of the top 2% I know.
There is no such thing as a new star developer... if you've been around for a year or two and produced some good stuff that hasn't blown up in anyone's face, then you might start to ignite the internal fusion required for star power...
Depends what you are looking for. A competent cog in a machine? Then your method is probably best. (And I'm not knocking cogs, every business needs them.) But if you are looking for an idea person, maybe not so much.
I'm an idea person, I tend to be hired by idea people, too many idea people in an organization is not usually a good thing - I'd say you need at least 9 cogs for every idea.
At least there's not a rope hanging from the ceiling.
Depends on the shop, I've had at least one job where there was an obvious rope hanging from the ceiling, they promised to cut it down when I started, but they failed.
The best pile reduction technique I ever employed was the 2 degrees of separation method, only consider those applicants whose references include people you, or your colleagues, know personally - takes the average pile of resumes down from 500 to just a couple. Quick call to the references gives a go / no-go on the remainder.
Has worked well for me in the past, doesn't even begin to resemble fair, but what in this life does?
I mean 300 lines of beautiful C is all fine and dandy but if it took you 3 months to write it and half of it is cut and pasted from the web how good is it really?
3 months is on the slow side, but cut and pasted from the web is just as good as, if not better than, regurgitating it from old textbooks or imagination - as long as you're not running afoul of license issues.
There's a technical ladder? Anywhere I've ever worked, it's more like a stool - start a decent distance off the floor, then go nowhere.
If you're hiring a sales guy, your interview should test his persistence, resilience, likability, and perhaps ability to hold his liquor.
If you're hiring a customer service rep, your interview should test their patience, politeness, and thoroughness at collecting information.
If you're hiring an engineer, solving puzzles is part of the job, brain teasers are one quick way to gauge how a potential hire will respond to the kind of task the job requires.
As for hiring HR staff, I'm not really sure how to judge them, other than the fact that any good person I've ever encountered in HR didn't stay in the job for long.
Nokia cut Qt mostly loose when sent Maemo to the rubbish bin.
Maybe some real Trolls (from Trolltech) can comment on the current level of autonomy.
If something evil happened to the Qt ownership, the code could still be forked, couldn't it?
Anybody notice that WOW is free to play up to level 20 now?
For WOW junkies, level 20 is laughable, but for people who have never played before, do you think 20 levels is enough to get you hooked?
Nothing new here:
Give away an $8 razor for $2.99 and sell the $0.02 blades for $0.25 each.
Give a non-user a taste of smack, or two, or three, then start charging after they are hooked.
Analogies about sex and marriage might be seen as in bad taste, but the same principle applies:
Give it away until they "need it," then charge some seemingly reasonable (but usually highly profitable) price for it later.
Open Source doesn't do that, but many of the most successful business models throughout time have.
The article that I had read yesterday suggested that they were going to wash their hands of it and blame the bloggers.
Sorry, but with a name like "Unruly Media," wasn't someone keeping an eye on them?
This is 90% of the problem today with the elimination of the inheritance tax that the founding fathers instituted. They wanted to prohibit the creation of an aristocracy to prevent a plutocracy from taking over and ruining the representative democracy they envisioned.
Yeah, I think we've already fallen off that cliff edge, it will be a struggle to get back to that vision.
For a twist, let's say that Disney/Pixar is predictable, as an investor of capital, I can reasonably predict that $20M sunk into a Disney feature will result in reasonable return on investment.
While many independents may be as good or better than Disney, especially if given equal resources, they're not given equal resources because they are not as predictable, not as safe an investment of capital, so the predictable winner wins.
Same reason a second drug store pops up on the corner across from a successful one - it's a safe investment, God knows we can't actually spread the things around where they might be twice as convenient for the customers, that would present a risk for the investors, better to put them somewhere safely demonstrated to be profitable so that you don't risk as much.
If you had hundreds of millions to protect and pass on to your heirs, you'd be rigging the system to make it as predictable as possible for those assets to stay in your family's hands. God knows we can't trust the kids to get as lucky as we did in succeeding.
I run two eeeBox B202s at home, XP does well on a 1.6 single core Atom with 2 or even 1 GB of Ram- 7, I'm not so sure about, and I'm not ready to plunk down half of what I paid for the machine in the first place to find out.
They physically tested the phone at the equator and in Sweden and that was the only way they could figure out that the solar flux would be higher at the equator?
Like, someone couldn't sit down at a desk with a calculator and trig it out and find out how much exactly the phone would get at 50 degrees N latitude as opposed to 0?
Someone fucking hire me. I will figure this shit out for you. I won't even need to be flown out anywhere (though southern Italy would be nice). I'll just crunch out the numbers and they will be accurate and a lot faster than what Nokia got their results.
--
BMO
Somebody sat at a desk with a calculator and trig'ed it out long before people went on the road to do the testing. Being Nokia, they may have had people in the field who did not have to travel, or, they just sent the engineers on a perk trip to do ground truth.
It isn't really tested until you've done the ground truth.
My phones for the last 5 years (Motorola and LG) have both run 2 weeks on a charge.
I see a reference to a Jan 3 peak here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrantids
Basically, meteor showers come at the same time every year, since this one is so "sharp," (8 hours of sparkles) it probably is only worth watching at a particular longitude every 4 years or so (as the Earth rotates 365.25 times around the sun...), but, if you're willing to travel for it, this meteor shower should hit on or about Jan 4 every year, as the Earth passes through the constellation Boötes.
because after that, people stopped working on trying to really jailbreak the phone. It was sad.
Sounds like brilliant strategy to me.
The 4th is our 37th wedding anniversary and the sky is celebrating.
As I understand meteor showers, she should be happy about a meteor shower on your anniversary every year, then.
But with WebOS, Palm employees initially constructed each app from scratch. Later, they made such blocks, but they were overhauled once by Palm and then again by H.P., forcing programmers to relearn how to build WebOS apps.
This is the same schtick that came around after Nokia dropped Qt... I'd say it's armchair quarterbacking from people who don't really understand programming at all, sounds good in the executive boardroom during the "lessons learned" meeting, but is impossible to verify unless you're in the trenches, and I bet that in the trenches you can find all kinds of conflicting opinions about what went wrong.
Isn't a collusive action like this no better than the legislation these corporations are trying to stop? Blocking the internet is blocking the internet, regardless of who does it and why.
There's a difference between a protest a few hours long and a law that will change the landscape for decades to come.
1978, the year that industry realized that "it" was getting out of hand - the year that my Dad gave me a portable cassette recorder as a toy.
Umm....you didn't read your quoted section entirely.
If I am a vendor and only accept credit and cash, I charge everyone the same amount, and give a cash discount. I have thus just charged a credit fee.
Incorrect. You are offering a "cash discount" which is, specifically, allowed by the credit card companies' agreements. You, however, must advertise the higher of the two prices as the price of the item in question. This has always been allowed. What you cannot do it advertise something for $3.99 and then try to charge somebody using a credit card a fee for using said card.
If you're going to be a credit card merchant, please at least know the rules.
Unless you're a gas station... literally thousands of gas stations in Florida advertise their cash / station-card price, then hit you for an additional 4-6 cents per gallon at the pump if you want to use your "normal" credit card. To which, I say, I get 12c per gallon back from my Visa card when I buy your gas, so take that, sucker.
I hope you're right. The processors in even a total homebrew have to come from somewhere and I can see the content providers requiring DRM being built right into the CPU.
They have teetered around getting Intel to do it, but it's a hard sell because that gives AMD an advantage, and, these days, you can do video media on ARM and any number of other architectures. Intel won't be giving up their market easily, and that's exactly what would happen if they became the MPAA's patsy before all their competition did.