Funniest one I have seen recently was listed as requiring 10 years of "professional experience as a Java developer". It was billed as "entry level" and was paying about 65K in San Francisco. I am not sure what part of it was wrong but all things considered it just looked a little off.
I was hired on at my current employer in February of 2004 and in the nearly 2 years I've been with them I have not received a raise. I lowballed my expected salary to 42,000 CAD when I was hired since I had no formal education but 4 years of experience... P.S. I'm considered a Senior Java, Web, and PL/SQL developer.
I swear that we are the only profession on the planet where 4-6 years experience is considered "senior". This is not a slap at the poster I quoted it is just something i find amusing. Certainly someone with 4-6 years experience isnt a "senior plumber" or "senior electrician".
What the heck are you smoking? How do you get from the effort that is required by statute and common law to defend a trademark to "will the LMI be extracting vast tribute from Linux vendors, and blackmailing them a-la Microsoft?"
What is really scary to me is that there is this kneejerk reaction that if an organization does anything at all to protect "intellectual property" -- a horrid term but one that I think actually does apply to trademarks because someone else using your trademarks can lessen the value of them -- it is some slippery slope from there to fiendish machinations and demands for royalties.
Call me a pollyanna but I refuse to believe that everyone in the world is inherently evil
Building codes can also make a big difference. My home got hit by TWO hurricanes last year. I had no damage. Lots of older homes near me get a lot of damage.
I don't know about your house but mine wouldn't do too well when hit with water 4 feet (or more) deep. Unless your building code requires all houses to have pontoons there is little that it is going to do to stop a flood.
Before someone brings up the example of drugs, let me try to answer it: those companies researching would still research, but they would also need to compete on manufacturing those drugs the best possible way and no such situation could arise where they try to sell AIDS medicine to poor african countries at the price of 20 times of the manufacturing costs only because of someone's intellectual property.
Unless you totally cover your R&D costs for the drug along with the costs of physically manufacturing a drug (or anything) along with the costs of developing the drugs that never made it to market you will lose money. If you lose money you will not be in business.
Similarly if your next door neighbour does no research but can lease a pill factory (work with me here) his costs are far less than yours and he can sell his product for less than you can and guess what.. you lose money and go out of business.
How does this scenario encourage innovation again?
Avalon, the new graphics subsystem, and the developer tools that will allow you to develop for it, have leapfrogged everything I have ever seen.
This seems to me to be comparable to saying "oooo that car is a pretty shade of yellow" and basing your buying decision on that. Now I know that it isnt as expensive a purchase but why would you do that on purpose?
As for the developer tools. If I were a betting man I would wager that the highest performance parts of the graphics subsystem will only be made available after you have signed off on a nondisclosure agreement or some singularly horrid license.
You can't sledge MS for taking longer than expected to release Vista, then in the next comment complain about the lack of features.
Sure you can. Not only that but you should because it logically is part of the same thought. If a project that I am working on takes a multiple of the time that I estimated it had better not have a fraction of the features or I will be looking for a new client.
Although I understand the basis for these sorts of laws, sometimes it is a bit extreme. It should be restricted to some LOGICAL extent.
Unfortunately what is logical in the application of laws is not necessarily what a person on the street would call logical. Legal writings have a specific language all their own and in the case of such things as trademarks (which it sounds they are trying to create in a demented fashion) it is necessary, and therefore logical, that all infringement be vigorously chased down because otherwise the risk is that the trademark becomes genericised and is no longer of practical value.
I think such a specification oriented programming model should be data oriented, meaning that data is the starting point, not an event driven GUI front-end, as it is now with most programming models.
I have a hearty AMEN to this statement. As a "backend" developer/designer it never ceases to amaze me to hear "well that is how the GUI does it" as a reason why some disturbingly odd bit of behaviour has to be implemented. This is especially disconcerting when it is the result of a decision made in the first iteration of a prototype to keep initial complexity down.
Why? They were test pilots, and flying is pretty important for a test pilot....
Granted, but the fact remains that they were killed while doing something that was for all intents and purposes a trip from point A to point B. The fact that they happened to be in the Apollo program when they died is simply not germane.
See and Freeman died doing something directly related to their job as astronauts (flying to McDonnell to inspect the Gemini capsul).
This may sound ghoulish but would you speak of them the same way if they had died in a commercial plane crash en route to that same inspection? Maybe it is just me but I do not think that you can call a death "directly related to their job" for anything other than insurance purposes just because it happened to be between two locations where they were working.
The US lost seven astronauts durring the Apollo program alone:
Elliott See plane(t-38) crash(along with Freeman)
Charles Bassett plane(t-38) crash
Theodore Freeman plane(t-38) crash (along with See)
Clifton Williams plane(t-38) crash
Virgil I. Grissom Apollo 1 fire
Ed White Apollo 1 fire
Roger B. Chaffee Apollo 1 fire
While each of these deaths was tragic I think it is misleading to group them into the same category. If you think about it, until Challenger the most dangerous vehicle for astronauts(as evidenced above) was the t-38 jet since it had been responsible for 4 deaths of active astronauts.
I am presuming that your use of the word "contained" is because it was there at one point and now is not. I was at the mirrored version not 10 mins ago and saw nothing "on the line" that had any identifiable human being that wasnt clearly labeled as a union member(by wearing a sign generally).
Perhaps they have realized that there are limits to what they should post in order to keep the public from thinking they are thugs.
Scabs/strikebreakers were physically accosted by strikers - hell there were a number of contracters who stopped working for Aliant, because even though they weren't Management or UNION, and technically didn't even work for Aliant but other companies that Aliant contracted, they were being taunted, harrassed and a target for the Union members.
And the company did such lovely things as calling summer students management so that they didn't count as "scabs" and using IT consultants from their consulting practice and paying them overtime. It is pretty hard to convince me that it was cost effective to do that.
There were ads in the newspapers before the strike began for replacement workers. Now, you can say that the company was just being "proactive" but it looked more like the company was girding for a long strike right from the beginning.
The company wanted to break the union and given the current anti-union sentiment in north america they had every indication that they could. It doesnt seem to have worked here.
A final note about the ALiant strike was that it was not about higher wages and better benefits. It was about using contract workers to replace employees (you don't have to pay benefits for contractors) and the company's desire to cut health benefits.
I am guessing that this was a reference to the Dieppe raid.
On l9th August 1942 troops of the Canadian 2nd Division formed the bulk of the Dieppe Raid. Of the 5,000 Canadians who took part, only about 2,000 returned to England: nearly 1,000 had been killed and 2,000 taken prisoner.
My admittedly faulty assumption was due to the level of information that I had to base it on. You mentioned an A.A and an BSc. It is apparently the case that you personally took major-level liberal arts courses. I give you full marks for this because it has been my experience that most technical people do not do that because they simply do not have to. I do note that you say that even your course of studies had 2 "appreciation" courses. To my mind they are the very type of course that you have said do not exist.
As to the comment about the GRE marks, I was under the impression (correct me if I am wrong) that they supposed to be indicative of ability or aptitude but they say little or nothing about the rigour of programme that is chosen. I do not deny for one moment that most of the extremely bright people that I have personally known have chosen to go into the sciences. That could simply be due to the fact that we have a tendency to value science highly. Let us be serious after all, in our society we really do not value any type of a liberal arts education as highly as one in science, engineering or business. Human nature being as it is, if someone is a polymath they will often choose their direction based on perceived rewards.
This alone could explain the higher test scores and the perception that the liberal arts would be an easy path since it would be true that people that have chosen to go into the sciences would have also have been able to succeed equally well in any other degree they have chosen.I do not think that because you can say "science majors do better on all parts of the GRE" you are necessarily saying that science is harder to do. The most that you could be saying is that smarter(by some definition) people go into science. It is my belief that Liberal arts and science are simply different and we happen to value science more highly. The question as I see it is why we do that. That is a question that I am not prepared to hazard a guess at since we value the ability to hit a golf ball into a little hole with great ease very highly as well.(yes I am watching the British Open)
I would also suggest that part of the reason that undergraduate liberal arts coursework is seen as accessible to more people is that science education has become, in general -- I know that there are counter-examples, less and less rigourous at the highschool level. To me this is an odd situation given the fact that we seem to value a higher education in science highly but I think that it is trumped by the fact that salaries for teachers in most jurisdictions fall far short of technical jobs. Just think about the number of engineers/programmers (since they are who we started out talking about) that make more money coming out of university than a veteran teacher. Now I am not for a moment saying that financial calculations are the only things that are used but I would submit that someone living in our society would be led to to choose a career at least partially on that basis.
It seems likely to me that if our society attached a substantial value to a knowledge of poetry or comparative religion we would be having this conversation flipped on its head because the very brightest/most talented people would go into liberal arts and would be saying "well the sciences are just so simple, how could they possibly compare in difficulty to my course of study in (fill in the blank)".
At the time I had not completed my B.Sc., but had earned an A.A. with a concentration in Engineering from Tyler Junior College. Frankly, given the courses that Miss Shields took my lowly A.A. was a vastly superior degree.... I do recall that it totally lacked any courses in mathematics, and had but one or two courses in the natural sciences....Miss Shields had *a* descriptive astronomy course. What her transcript reveled was a total lack of any rigorous course work on the part of Miss Shields while she was at Princeton.
Actually all that it revealed is that she wasn't a science/engineering student.
I have a Comp.Sci degree but along the way I took a great many "arts" courses and it is certainly not correct to say that my engineering courses were any more difficult than some of the 4th year Philosophy courses I took. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because English/Economics/whatever were easy for you in high school or even as freshman courses in university it means that the disciplines that they are introductions to are easy to master.
Microsoft was the first company to utilize intelligent agents in their Software. Yes, that little stupid dog and clippy are annoying, but they are not available elsewhere.
Not available elsewhere precisely because they are annoying and more or less useless.
Failure != lack of innovation.
Microsoft was the first to integrate a browser into the OS. While this does include some very bad concepts and potentially opens it up to more security problems, it's innovative.
Innovation that is less useful/more annoying/more dangerous than the original method of doing something is not substantially different from lack of innovation. Personally when I think of the word "innovation" I always read in "and useful". What is the point of being wrong in new and exciting ways?
So innovative that the KDE crew does it as well.
I am not sure that I agree with the characterization here but even if you take it as a given, the fact that someone else copies a bad idea does not instantly turn it into a good idea.
They are, in fact, incredibly stupid if they think their tactics will work to coerce ANY policy change if I (and others who believe strongly in Western ideals) have anything to say about it. Luckily, because I live in a democracy, I do have something to say about it, and I have done precisely that in 2002 and 2004.
Bombing trains in Spain seemed to be pretty effective in influencing an election. I am not saying this to be flip it just seems pretty evident in light of what happened there.
Slashdot Mirror
Funniest one I have seen recently was listed as requiring 10 years of "professional experience as a Java developer". It was billed as "entry level" and was paying about 65K in San Francisco. I am not sure what part of it was wrong but all things considered it just looked a little off.
I blame 90% of weird job-related stuff on HR. I used to think that catbert was a caricature, now i see that he/she is a mere shadow of the truth
I swear that we are the only profession on the planet where 4-6 years experience is considered "senior". This is not a slap at the poster I quoted it is just something i find amusing. Certainly someone with 4-6 years experience isnt a "senior plumber" or "senior electrician".
What the heck are you smoking? How do you get from the effort that is required by statute and common law to defend a trademark to "will the LMI be extracting vast tribute from Linux vendors, and blackmailing them a-la Microsoft?"
What is really scary to me is that there is this kneejerk reaction that if an organization does anything at all to protect "intellectual property" -- a horrid term but one that I think actually does apply to trademarks because someone else using your trademarks can lessen the value of them -- it is some slippery slope from there to fiendish machinations and demands for royalties.
Call me a pollyanna but I refuse to believe that everyone in the world is inherently evil
Unless you totally cover your R&D costs for the drug along with the costs of physically manufacturing a drug (or anything) along with the costs of developing the drugs that never made it to market you will lose money. If you lose money you will not be in business.
Similarly if your next door neighbour does no research but can lease a pill factory (work with me here) his costs are far less than yours and he can sell his product for less than you can and guess what .. you lose money and go out of business.
How does this scenario encourage innovation again?This seems to me to be comparable to saying "oooo that car is a pretty shade of yellow" and basing your buying decision on that. Now I know that it isnt as expensive a purchase but why would you do that on purpose?
As for the developer tools. If I were a betting man I would wager that the highest performance parts of the graphics subsystem will only be made available after you have signed off on a nondisclosure agreement or some singularly horrid license.
Wasn't there once a story about a goose and a golden egg that had people as stupid as the record industry execs in it?
Elliott See plane(t-38) crash(along with Freeman)
Charles Bassett plane(t-38) crash
Theodore Freeman plane(t-38) crash (along with See)
Clifton Williams plane(t-38) crash
Virgil I. Grissom Apollo 1 fire
Ed White Apollo 1 fire
Roger B. Chaffee Apollo 1 fire
While each of these deaths was tragic I think it is misleading to group them into the same category. If you think about it, until Challenger the most dangerous vehicle for astronauts(as evidenced above) was the t-38 jet since it had been responsible for 4 deaths of active astronauts.
Perhaps they have realized that there are limits to what they should post in order to keep the public from thinking they are thugs.
And the company did such lovely things as calling summer students management so that they didn't count as "scabs" and using IT consultants from their consulting practice and paying them overtime. It is pretty hard to convince me that it was cost effective to do that.
There were ads in the newspapers before the strike began for replacement workers. Now, you can say that the company was just being "proactive" but it looked more like the company was girding for a long strike right from the beginning. The company wanted to break the union and given the current anti-union sentiment in north america they had every indication that they could. It doesnt seem to have worked here.
A final note about the ALiant strike was that it was not about higher wages and better benefits. It was about using contract workers to replace employees (you don't have to pay benefits for contractors) and the company's desire to cut health benefits.
Another reason to like binding arbitration...My admittedly faulty assumption was due to the level of information that I had to base it on. You mentioned an A.A and an BSc. It is apparently the case that you personally took major-level liberal arts courses. I give you full marks for this because it has been my experience that most technical people do not do that because they simply do not have to. I do note that you say that even your course of studies had 2 "appreciation" courses. To my mind they are the very type of course that you have said do not exist.
As to the comment about the GRE marks, I was under the impression (correct me if I am wrong) that they supposed to be indicative of ability or aptitude but they say little or nothing about the rigour of programme that is chosen. I do not deny for one moment that most of the extremely bright people that I have personally known have chosen to go into the sciences. That could simply be due to the fact that we have a tendency to value science highly. Let us be serious after all, in our society we really do not value any type of a liberal arts education as highly as one in science, engineering or business. Human nature being as it is, if someone is a polymath they will often choose their direction based on perceived rewards.
This alone could explain the higher test scores and the perception that the liberal arts would be an easy path since it would be true that people that have chosen to go into the sciences would have also have been able to succeed equally well in any other degree they have chosen.I do not think that because you can say "science majors do better on all parts of the GRE" you are necessarily saying that science is harder to do. The most that you could be saying is that smarter(by some definition) people go into science. It is my belief that Liberal arts and science are simply different and we happen to value science more highly. The question as I see it is why we do that. That is a question that I am not prepared to hazard a guess at since we value the ability to hit a golf ball into a little hole with great ease very highly as well.(yes I am watching the British Open)
I would also suggest that part of the reason that undergraduate liberal arts coursework is seen as accessible to more people is that science education has become, in general -- I know that there are counter-examples, less and less rigourous at the highschool level. To me this is an odd situation given the fact that we seem to value a higher education in science highly but I think that it is trumped by the fact that salaries for teachers in most jurisdictions fall far short of technical jobs. Just think about the number of engineers/programmers (since they are who we started out talking about) that make more money coming out of university than a veteran teacher. Now I am not for a moment saying that financial calculations are the only things that are used but I would submit that someone living in our society would be led to to choose a career at least partially on that basis.
It seems likely to me that if our society attached a substantial value to a knowledge of poetry or comparative religion we would be having this conversation flipped on its head because the very brightest/most talented people would go into liberal arts and would be saying "well the sciences are just so simple, how could they possibly compare in difficulty to my course of study in (fill in the blank)".
Actually all that it revealed is that she wasn't a science/engineering student.
I have a Comp.Sci degree but along the way I took a great many "arts" courses and it is certainly not correct to say that my engineering courses were any more difficult than some of the 4th year Philosophy courses I took. Do not make the mistake of thinking that because English/Economics/whatever were easy for you in high school or even as freshman courses in university it means that the disciplines that they are introductions to are easy to master.
Am I the only person that finds the latest blog entry by this person quite interesting in light of this story?
And this boys and girls is why "regular folks" think we techies are a bunch of free-loading twits who have a false sense of entitlement.