I had this job interview for an IT position at a bio tech firm in Redwood City (circa 2011). The recruiter at Robert Half sent me over in a suit and tie. No receptionist in the lobby. So I called the contact number on the desk phone, left a voicemail and took a seat. For the next 90 minutes I sat in the lobby, watching traffic go in and out. The recruiter kept calling to ask where the hell I was. A guy in a track suit who came through three times earlier asked who I was and introduced himself as the hiring manager. The CEO was dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt. The scientists I walked by were very respectful. Everyone thought I was a venture capitalist.
Yes, yes, but that's because A) Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of College. B) Their parents were wealthy enough they didn't need loans anyway.
You forgot Steve Jobs. But he free-loaded his way through school before dropping out.
You realize that colleges, just tuition, cost $12-15k a year now, right? They charge more for engineering programs, etc.
The professional development courses I'm likely to take at this stage of my career (20+ years) still cost $700 to $1,000 per class. That haven't changed in a decade.
And I'm amazed you found a job that would give you that much overtime and that you didn't burn out during it or had time to do, I don't know, like three sections of calculus a week?
I was a lead video game tester during my second tour through community college. My supervisors complained that I wasn't working 80 hours and gave too much responsibilities to my assistant lead testers. All three of my assistant lead testers went on to become lead testers. Since I already completed an A.A. degree during my first tour of community college, I only needed to complete the major classes for the A.S. degree. Two classes per semester for five years wasn't a big deal. It also helped that I spent five years programming the LAMP stack for my personal website prior to going back to school to formally learn computer programming.
You've fallen prey to the typical "back-in-my-day" logic of old people everywhere.
Funny, I thought it was from having unrealistic expectations. A friend's brother sent his daughter from the West Coast to acting school in New York City at $36,000 per semester for four years because the girl aspired to be a Broadway actress. She worked in off-Broadway productions during the summer. But the summer after graduation, she couldn't find a job, returned to home and works as a cashier at Staples. There are easier ways to get a minimum-wage job.
Not at the Apple Store. A vintage product is anything over five years old and not serviceable. They obviously made an exception for my six year MacBook at the time.
When I went to community college in the early 1990's, I collected bottle and cans on campus to pay for next semester's classes and books because my parents (sixth-grade and high-school graduates) didn't believe in higher education. After doing that for a year, and avoiding a 98-year-old with a pointy stick who also collected recyclables, I got a job at the bookstore warehouse and worked 30 hours per week while taking 12 units.
My second tour through college after the dot com bust was paid for with a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. I was working 60+ hours per week as a video game tester, teaching Sunday school and taking two classes per semester for five years. Made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major.
The most successful college students I know have worked their way through college without racking student loans.
The engineering talent at Google is very much like high school. All the "winners" attend there. Meanwhile, the "losers" (everyone else) are support contractors.
Five years old is vintage, ten year old is ancient and fifteen years old is palaeolithic.
Last year I replaced the "vintage" 320GB hard drives with 1TB hard dives in my file server, replaced the "ancient" Vista-compatible motherboard with a Win7-compatible motherboard, and tossed out a "palaeolithic" AT-to-PS2 keyboard adapter.;)
Orange is the new black. Nearly everything in my home office is black — and difficult to find anything. I've been adding the orange to the color scheme (i.e, replacing black network cables and Velcro straps with orange network cables and Velcro straps).
Vintage is older than five years. When I took my 2006 black MacBook into the Apple Store in 2012, they replaced the CPU fan and battery even though it was a "vintage" Apple product. When the tech broke the cable between the keyboard top and motherboard, they replaced the keyboard top. All the parts were in stock for a six-year-old laptop.
I'm still waiting for a worthy successor to my 2006 black MacBook (yes, I paid the extra $200 for black version). Still a conversation piece when I bring it into the Apple Store. Not many Apple Store employees have ever seen a legendary black MacBook.
And gets up at 4am to ride 2 hour bus to drink his skinny latte and be paid $50k/yr for the privilege and no longer weighs 350 lbs.
I get up 4:30AM to catch the 6:00AM express bus to start work at 7:00AM. Yes, I have a skinny vanilla latte every morning. I made $50K plus I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus last year. I still weight 350 pounds. Your point?
...many people do not want to distinguish between shitty helpdesk/lowly IT positions, and higher level techs.
Help desk I haven't done in ten years. I've done PC refresh projects at eBay and a local hospital, and built out a data center for Google. Upgraded and tracked 300+ laptops with 11ac wireless cards at Cisco. I'm currently doing InfoSec remediation for government IT. None of these positions are either "shitty" or "lowly".
Well I guess Trump is just that awesome he can golf and get more accomplished for the american worker then any other president.
That's bullshit. If Trump keeps playing golf every weekend,
the cost of security in one year ($120M) will exceed the cost of security for Obama in eight years ($96M).
I do IT support. All my contracts for 10+ years have prohibited me from working more than 40 hours per week. Last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus.
I had a supervisor who assigned me two separate projects that had a one-month gap between them. I documented that I would take them with the understanding that there will be trouble if the two projects overlapped. The inevitable train wreck came when the first project overlapped the second project, both projects got delayed and later reassigned to other people to straighten out. Supervisor tried to throw me under the bus but I had documentation that he didn't lift a finger to help me. What happened? Supervisor got promoted out of the department and I didn't have a project for 90 days.
Next supervisor told me not to document any of his activities. Of course, I documented that and everything else. Soon I was being written up for insubordination for... you guess it... documenting his interference with my project.
When he gave me the "his way or the highway" speech,
I resigned as soon as my current project was done. I was the third out of a dozen senior employees who headed for the exits that year. Supervisor rode the company into bankruptcy.
Slashdot Mirror
A recent Nessus scan at my job found garage door openers on the general network. O_o
Their parents were wealthy enough that they didn't feel that they need to support themselves with a college degree.
Steve Jobs' parents weren't wealthy.
We have server hamsters running around in the basement.
I had this job interview for an IT position at a bio tech firm in Redwood City (circa 2011). The recruiter at Robert Half sent me over in a suit and tie. No receptionist in the lobby. So I called the contact number on the desk phone, left a voicemail and took a seat. For the next 90 minutes I sat in the lobby, watching traffic go in and out. The recruiter kept calling to ask where the hell I was. A guy in a track suit who came through three times earlier asked who I was and introduced himself as the hiring manager. The CEO was dressed in blue jeans and a polo shirt. The scientists I walked by were very respectful. Everyone thought I was a venture capitalist.
Yes, yes, but that's because A) Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of College. B) Their parents were wealthy enough they didn't need loans anyway.
You forgot Steve Jobs. But he free-loaded his way through school before dropping out.
You realize that colleges, just tuition, cost $12-15k a year now, right? They charge more for engineering programs, etc.
The professional development courses I'm likely to take at this stage of my career (20+ years) still cost $700 to $1,000 per class. That haven't changed in a decade.
https://www.ucsc-extension.edu/
And I'm amazed you found a job that would give you that much overtime and that you didn't burn out during it or had time to do, I don't know, like three sections of calculus a week?
I was a lead video game tester during my second tour through community college. My supervisors complained that I wasn't working 80 hours and gave too much responsibilities to my assistant lead testers. All three of my assistant lead testers went on to become lead testers. Since I already completed an A.A. degree during my first tour of community college, I only needed to complete the major classes for the A.S. degree. Two classes per semester for five years wasn't a big deal. It also helped that I spent five years programming the LAMP stack for my personal website prior to going back to school to formally learn computer programming.
Sounds like you're just making stuff up.
As a miracle worker, I get that all the time.
You've fallen prey to the typical "back-in-my-day" logic of old people everywhere.
Funny, I thought it was from having unrealistic expectations. A friend's brother sent his daughter from the West Coast to acting school in New York City at $36,000 per semester for four years because the girl aspired to be a Broadway actress. She worked in off-Broadway productions during the summer. But the summer after graduation, she couldn't find a job, returned to home and works as a cashier at Staples. There are easier ways to get a minimum-wage job.
Vintage is in the age of the beholder...
Not at the Apple Store. A vintage product is anything over five years old and not serviceable. They obviously made an exception for my six year MacBook at the time.
When I went to community college in the early 1990's, I collected bottle and cans on campus to pay for next semester's classes and books because my parents (sixth-grade and high-school graduates) didn't believe in higher education. After doing that for a year, and avoiding a 98-year-old with a pointy stick who also collected recyclables, I got a job at the bookstore warehouse and worked 30 hours per week while taking 12 units.
My second tour through college after the dot com bust was paid for with a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. I was working 60+ hours per week as a video game tester, teaching Sunday school and taking two classes per semester for five years. Made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major.
The most successful college students I know have worked their way through college without racking student loans.
The engineering talent at Google is very much like high school. All the "winners" attend there. Meanwhile, the "losers" (everyone else) are support contractors.
Five years old is vintage, ten year old is ancient and fifteen years old is palaeolithic.
Last year I replaced the "vintage" 320GB hard drives with 1TB hard dives in my file server, replaced the "ancient" Vista-compatible motherboard with a Win7-compatible motherboard, and tossed out a "palaeolithic" AT-to-PS2 keyboard adapter. ;)
Nobody buys that shit... Of course it would bebin stock.
Most people bought the white MacBook because it was $200 cheaper and therefore more common than the black MacBook.
Once you go black...?
Orange is the new black. Nearly everything in my home office is black — and difficult to find anything. I've been adding the orange to the color scheme (i.e, replacing black network cables and Velcro straps with orange network cables and Velcro straps).
Vintage is older than five years. When I took my 2006 black MacBook into the Apple Store in 2012, they replaced the CPU fan and battery even though it was a "vintage" Apple product. When the tech broke the cable between the keyboard top and motherboard, they replaced the keyboard top. All the parts were in stock for a six-year-old laptop.
You wouldn't believe how impractical it is to try to rack mount a cylindrical computer.
You can rack them — for a price.
https://eshop.macsales.com/item/Sonnet%20Technologies/RACKPRO2X/
I'm still waiting for a worthy successor to my 2006 black MacBook (yes, I paid the extra $200 for black version). Still a conversation piece when I bring it into the Apple Store. Not many Apple Store employees have ever seen a legendary black MacBook.
Wait, what? Your script takes so long? What do you write that in, VB?
PowerShell. It takes a while to query 80,000+ workstations, especially if the query is complex.
Anybody who ever weighed 350 lbs could safely be dragged into the streets and shot and society would be better for it.
I'm not a butterball. I'm often asked if I played football in high school or college. Or if I ever worked as a bouncer.
And gets up at 4am to ride 2 hour bus to drink his skinny latte and be paid $50k/yr for the privilege and no longer weighs 350 lbs.
I get up 4:30AM to catch the 6:00AM express bus to start work at 7:00AM. Yes, I have a skinny vanilla latte every morning. I made $50K plus I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus last year. I still weight 350 pounds. Your point?
...many people do not want to distinguish between shitty helpdesk/lowly IT positions, and higher level techs.
Help desk I haven't done in ten years. I've done PC refresh projects at eBay and a local hospital, and built out a data center for Google. Upgraded and tracked 300+ laptops with 11ac wireless cards at Cisco. I'm currently doing InfoSec remediation for government IT. None of these positions are either "shitty" or "lowly".
Well I guess Trump is just that awesome he can golf and get more accomplished for the american worker then any other president.
That's bullshit. If Trump keeps playing golf every weekend, the cost of security in one year ($120M) will exceed the cost of security for Obama in eight years ($96M).
https://www.bustle.com/p/how-much-do-trumps-golf-trips-cost-his-mar-a-lago-visits-dont-come-cheap-46401
Sleepy hilary would still be deleting emails from her server.
More bullshit. Stop making excuses for Trump. He's unfit to serve as POTUS. The whole world knows it
I do IT support. All my contracts for 10+ years have prohibited me from working more than 40 hours per week. Last year I got an extra month of pay as a Christmas bonus.
I had a supervisor who assigned me two separate projects that had a one-month gap between them. I documented that I would take them with the understanding that there will be trouble if the two projects overlapped. The inevitable train wreck came when the first project overlapped the second project, both projects got delayed and later reassigned to other people to straighten out. Supervisor tried to throw me under the bus but I had documentation that he didn't lift a finger to help me. What happened? Supervisor got promoted out of the department and I didn't have a project for 90 days.
Next supervisor told me not to document any of his activities. Of course, I documented that and everything else. Soon I was being written up for insubordination for... you guess it... documenting his interference with my project. When he gave me the "his way or the highway" speech, I resigned as soon as my current project was done. I was the third out of a dozen senior employees who headed for the exits that year. Supervisor rode the company into bankruptcy.
So it's not running in parallel? ;)
That would make the server hamsters jittery. O_o
It is astonishing how such a simple software can have so many bugs that they pay my price and hire me to fix them.
Microsoft has been indirectly paying my paycheck for 20+ year years. I don't see that changing in the next 20+ years.