God I wish I knew where they came from, 'cause I'd love to have a copy myself.
These used to hang on the wall of the 7th floor at UUNET waaaay back in the day... where the sysadmins hung out... at least that's the only place I've ever seen them.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/unix-magic-overacre-poster.jpg
the above is just one in a series, there were several others.
If you can find them, they'd be great.
By definition, any job whose primary enabling factor is broadband, can be done from anywhere in the world, cheaper. IF any jobs AT ALL are created, it won't take long to ship 'em overseas.
Try again.
Maybe "green" technology could stimulate the economy, with the right policy decisions, and the right breakthroughs.
Damn, I really expected *someone* here would have mentioned it by now.
It was a couple of years ago. It was IBM, and I thought it did a pretty damn good job of explaining to the world WTF Linux is and why they should care.
In all seriousness, there is a piece of equipment called the Aft Power Unit (APU) which is essentially a jet engine in a box on wheels, that you cart out to the plane and hook up to pump air through the turbines when it's parked at the gate. On the older model planes, it runs ac and heat and stuff.
Bar none, that is the LOUDEST f-ing thing I've ever dealt with ever. It was so loud the vibrations from from just standing around it used to make the muscles in my chest cavity ache.
I was always scared shitless that something was gonna come loose in it and it was gonna blow apart, but it never did.
>people telling about the events in the movie or constantly laughing at bad places.
interestingly enough, that was the reason to see snakes on a plane in the theater. There's no way in hell I'd ever rent that, it was god-awful. But if you watch it in a room full of 100 other people mocking it mercilessly from beginning to end... that's actually fun
yes, it is a prerequisite for most meaningful computing tasks, including using the internet. so it makes since to make sure the kids at least know how to read and write before giving them a computer.
HERE HERE! You should have moved your list higher up in your post so it'd have been "above the fold". I can't agree more, at least with the things in your list.
However... being involved, being a good parent, helping with the school work being involved, yeah, that helps, but it ain't a panacea, my friend. You'd be surprised how many of us parents are indeed, NOT ASSHOLES, and our kids STILL have problems in school...
Mr. CEO has a point, but it's masked in a lot of bullcrap marketing-speak. Strip away all the pop-culture references about text messaging and iPods and the WII. Merely using technology does not make you smarter or dumber. However, using it ALL THE DAMN TIME since pretty much THE DAY YOU WERE BORN... well... that does CHANGE the WAY you learn.
Specifically, it changes the way your brain develops, the way your neurons form pathways or whatever. I'm not a doctor or a neuro-scientist or anything. I'm just a parent who had ADD when I was a kid, and whose kids now have ADD... and yes me and my kids have used computers since we were old enough to move a mouse, and I have a hunch.
Among other things, it's my understanding that our minds are formed through learning to predict stimulus-response type scenarios. Like when you're a baby, you learn to cry because you know that someone's gonna feed you, or remove your feces or what have you.
When it comes to processing symbolic information (i.e. learning to read, learning math, or language.. anything abstract) our brains have become used to processing data differently... at least those of us who have used information technology heavily from an early age (and possibly have a genetic predisposition as well).
What Mr. Techno-babble CEO is observing has not a damn thing to do with iPods and WIIs it has to do with the fact that we're bringing up a generation with a higher percentage of people whose minds have learned to process symbolic data differently. This will be a crisis, unless some real research gets in front of it, and we start learning how to effectively teach people who learn in these new ways.
That appears to be a Christian sex-toy site.
No really, I think that's what it is.
Ok then... I think that's all I had to say on the subject.
I'm going to go spend some time off the tubes for a while, my brain hurts.
Day after day, this guy has to sell games to little bastards who can barely read the package, and can't tell how much change they're owed.
How much money do you think a manager of a Game Stop makes? I don't really know, but I'd venture to guess, magnitudes less than most of the IT professionals commenting in this thread.
What do you think the guy had to lose, really? Did he really think his corporate masters were going to stand for FEWER sales where they could have been MORE? Hell no!
This guy knew full well WTF he was doing, and it was absolutely brilliant. He made his statement, and got his 15 minutes... Game Stop will fire him, no doubt, but with any luck he'll land a sweet "gamer community correspondent" gig with CNN, or write a book or something.
If you've got to burn out of your just-barely-more-than-minimum-wage job, I can't think of a better way to do it, and with flourish, no less.
NO, it's not some nefarious "let's create the demand so people will buy it" nonsense. It's durability, plain and simple.
Look, putting a delicate little spinning disk in your pocket and carrying it with you everywhere you go, WHILE IT'S RUNNING, is just a bad f-ing idea. If you try dancing around with it like the guy in the commercial, it's just plain idiotic.
Three HD based iPods have died for me *on schedule* after 1 year of continuous use (within days of the 1 yeas anniversary in fact). The first time, it was a week early, so I got a free replacement with my AppleCare plan, the second time it was 2 weeks late, so I had to buy a new one. When that one died, I swore off iPods... you know unless they could make one that wasn't going to have a disk crap out... so there's a demand for iPods that don't have disk drives.
So when some day you collapse in a crowded restaraunt, who is going to rush to the sceene, charge up the defibrulator and save your life?
Who is going to *design* the defibrulator that saved your life?
Who is going to perform cardiac surgery for you?
Answer: someone else's kids.
Human society is a web of dependance, the continued existence of which, depends on intelegent people procreating and taking the time and energy to raise productive individuals who can contrubute back to that web.
everybody gets old.
It floors me how a lot of the time, the same people who will tell you that we urgently need to colonize other planets because the human race is too precious and rare to take the risk that it could be wiped out by a planet-wide catastrophe, are the same folks who are unwilling to contribute their time and energy in the here and now to do their part to perpetuate humanity.
If you can't contribute your genetic material, there's always adoption.
And to bring it back on topic... I belive El Jobso was adopted.
*yawn*... wake me up when they submit sources for one of their tracks to the creative commons for remixing (at ccMixter.org).
Trent, we get it that you're depressed and all, why not let people REALLY go wild with one of your tracks? It might cheer you up, and all the cool kids are doing it, anyhow:
Why should I bother putting my time and creative energy into remixing your tracks, if I'm legally bound not to post it on my blog, make a music video with it and post it on youtube, or even burn CDs for my friends with it?
Encouraging students to drop mathematics? Hell, the establishment has been doing this foerever!
What is the primary function of Statistics, Calculus and Diff-EQ classes in most universities? Answer: weed out the "non-hard-core engineers", in other words... "making new art history majors daily".
These subjects don't have to be hard. I realize that after going through the hell it took to get through them. In college at least, these things are presented in a way that is INTENTIONALLY OBTUSE.
First there's the shitty textbooks, which are intentionally shitty, in an attempt to sell a)study guides, b)subscriptions to "study help" websites.
Then there's the professors. Some are great. I had exactly one truely great math professor in college for Calc 2. Sure the material was challenging, but the approach wasn't, which is more than I can say for the rest of my math professors. They're sole motivation seemed to be to throw up barriers to understanding. Why? Hell I don't know for sure. My guess is at the core, it has something to do with being in the situaion where you have to daily give the knowlege away that makes you valuable in the marketplace... at least at a subconscious level, I'm pretty sure that's going on with a lot of 'em.
Almost nothing we teach in maths below graduate level is newer than 200 years old. We should have learned how to teach it propperly by now.
Students have been "encouraged" to drop maths all along, so what's the big deal that we're saying it out loud now?
Apple beat the Beatles after like a 20 year court battle over the name "Apple".
Apple's lawyers are fueled by an enormous never ending supply of hipster money from it's iPod sales. These are no ordinary lawyers... these are APPLE lawers... impecably dressed, chi-centered, zen-bhuddist, miso soup sipping legal ass kicking machines. They also tote the coolest damn industrial-designed breifcases you've ever seen.
if you're not old enough to drink, you're not old enough to whine about these damn kids who don't understand vinyl. You're complaining about yourself dude.
> I can be doing this full-time instead of being someone else's bitch, err, employee.
Heh... well I tried this too. I think you'll find, as I did, that you are in fact, still someone's bitch. It's just that person is your customer now, where they were previously your employer.
I guess it depends on what your's specificaly in to. I tried contract programming, and got a real quick refresher in global market economics.
I took a "quick and easy" $200 "1 week" contract that balooned into a 6 week fiasco. Oh, my code was fine, but when you're on your own, every little thing is your problem. Specifically, the client coluldn't get it installed on his machine. Then he couldn't figgure out how to run it, then it ran "slow" (because he had some sort of super slow internet connection), etc, etc, etc.
6 weeks. $200.
And the guys in India and China would have done 10 weeks for $50. seriously. The client felt like he got ripped, and so did I.
And thus my dreams of eventual self employment were dashed. And I went back to working for the man.
Think for a minute what it's like to be a MALE teacher, in an overwhelmingly FEMALE dominated arena. I had two male teachers growing up. One of them was involved in a real sex scandal. The other was an incredibly gifted math and computer science teacher with mediocre social skills. He was a geek, and into computers, and shy... so it was just socially assumed he was some kind of pedophile or something. He quit after one year (I'm guessing because of the rumors and such). Thanks to that, I never got to take a real programming course in high school (he was the only teacher with the backgrouind for it... it was a small town school in the 80's).
So. You've been in this game long enough to make it up to administrator, and principal. All it takes is a *HINT* of impropriety to get your ass fired by the school board.
So some smartass teenagers make a myspace page about you... not the flattering kind. You don't know anything about computers. Your IT guy (apparently) dosen't know anything about computers.
What would YOU do? You have a family to support, this is your livelihood.
Not saying everything the guy did was right, but try that shoe on the other foot for a minute. I think I understand where he was coming from.
Oh really? So what company is going to foot the bill for building this alternative neutral backbone, when BY DEFINITION, they'll be making less money on it than their non-neutral competitors?
Here's the thing about IT jobs. In most large to medium sized companies, they're probably 30% to 50% fluff. Like DOT workers, there's always a lot more "supervisors" than "guys diggin' the hole".
That's at once the wonderful and horrible thing about capitalism: everyone needs a job, even the unskilled, the incapable. This is not a recent phenomena, it's ALWAYS been this way. If you're a programmer and you work on a team just try and tell me it ain't true. There's always 2 or 3 guys who bust ass around the clock, and there are 5, 6, or 20 guys bullshittn' all day.
At least in the company where I work, Americans are not getting the fluff jobs, we're getting the "diggin' the hole" jobs. The reason is that these H1B guys come over willing to work for around $45 or $50k a year via some shaddy-ass contracting company. They've all got MULTIPLE masters degrees from universities, most often in Hyderbad (hope I'm spelling it correctly).
I don't know how smart these guys really are. I CAN'T TELL because most of the time the language barrier entials between 30% and 50% data loss in spoken conversation, with maybe a 5% to 10% gain using written communication like IM or email. Maybe they really are all super geniuses, but with that language barrier, I know for a fact most couldn't hack it in an entry level CS course at the local community college.
Maybe it's that language barrier, but my gut tells me it might be, perhaps "easier" to obtain graduate degrees from Indian universities. Or maybe these guys are just straight up lying about their education, I mean what are the chances of an employer's HR department calling an Indian university to verify the degree of a contractor, literally someone ELSE'S employee?
slim to none.
Either way, upper management doesn't care anyhow, they just filled a $120k/year seat for $50k/year and no benefits.
So these guys come in, and for as smart as they might or might not be, they're pieces that don't fit into the puzzle. Our development teams can't communicate effectively with them, we can't get them to solve problems for us. So, they ride a barstool or hang around the water cooler, and those of us who haven't been replaced (out of necessity -- SOMEONE has to dig the hole)... we get to work ever increasing workloads, ridiculous timelines, and basically work ourselves into an early grave.
Frankly, it could just as easily go the other way. We could be working our H1-B folks into the ground while the American staff goofs. I've just never seen that in real life, but hell, I hear about it all the time, specially on slashdot. Maybe it's the industry I'm in, if I were in the business of building web applications based on java using "popular templating engine X", maybe it'd more likely to go the other way. I don't know.
From my perspective, these people are stealing our cheese. The only thing they're enabling is for cheap-ass companies to fill the inevitable number of slacker jobs in any organization with people working for less than half the going rate for locals. Don't kid yourself, this is a VERY BAD THING for our society.
Whatever you may think of the slackers in your organization, know that by and large, they use the money they make do to meaningful things outisde the office; to raise families, and take care of aging parents, etc. These are things that our societal safety net has to catch otherwise.
I have nothing against the people who come here on H1-B's, they're doing what everyone in the world does, just trying to make a living. The bottom line is, that Americans aren't "unwilling or unable" to do the work that we're bringing these people in to do, it's that we're not even being offered the opportunity to in a lot of cases. In our own country.
The madness must stop.
Either that or I should just breakdown and start learning Hindi now, to avoid the rush in about 10 years when that's where all the GOOD jobs have gone.
So I've been telecommuting since Summer for a giant telco. I worked in the corporate HQ for about 8 years before I started the telecommuting, and honestly it wasn't by choice. I just had to start doing it, because my workload skyrocketed, no new help was hired, and my friends just wouldn't stop wasting my time in the office.
Is it hurting my chances for promotion? Chance for promotion before telecommuting 0%, chances for promotion after telecommuting... 0%.
At least in this company, when you're technically competent and people depend on you, that's a virtual guarantee that you'll be doing the exact same thing you're doing presently for your entire length of employment.
Telecommuting is a fantastic lifestyle. I gave up my social life at work, but in return, I got my family back. I'm like... a real dad now, instead of the dude who gets out of the house at sunup and shows up just before bedtime.
If I didn't get more work done this way, though it'd never work, and I'd be looking at a lot worse than "no promotion".
If your considdering telecommuting:
A) know and understand the "risks" to your "career"... if you were never management material to start with, it's probably worth the "risk".
B) I can't emphasise this enough: Make a separate space in your home for working. When you enter this space, you're at work. When you leave this space, you're at home. Do NOT enter this space on your free time FOR ANY REASON. Keep your personal and work life physically separated. Otherwise your life will turn into a nightmareish comingling of work and personal time. You'll go nuts in 6 weeks flat.
Well... you see the thing is, that there are a LOT more people in the world who want a big ass expensive status symbol than there are that want a "useful, hackable mini-computer".
That is why the iPod beat the pants off of Nomad. It's also why Hummer is actually able to sell cars, even with the crazy high gas prices.
Slashdot Mirror
no way, they all think different about salaries
God I wish I knew where they came from, 'cause I'd love to have a copy myself. These used to hang on the wall of the 7th floor at UUNET waaaay back in the day ... where the sysadmins hung out ... at least that's the only place I've ever seen them.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/unix-magic-overacre-poster.jpg
the above is just one in a series, there were several others.
If you can find them, they'd be great.
Teh Intarnets, that's why. You're posting this on slashdot, so obviously you're not retarded.
By definition, any job whose primary enabling factor is broadband, can be done from anywhere in the world, cheaper. IF any jobs AT ALL are created, it won't take long to ship 'em overseas.
Try again.
Maybe "green" technology could stimulate the economy, with the right policy decisions, and the right breakthroughs.
Damn, I really expected *someone* here would have mentioned it by now.
It was a couple of years ago. It was IBM, and I thought it did a pretty damn good job of explaining to the world WTF Linux is and why they should care.
and it was pretty damn awesome.
LOL ... NEXT to, not IN FRONT of. :-)
In all seriousness, there is a piece of equipment called the Aft Power Unit (APU) which is essentially a jet engine in a box on wheels, that you cart out to the plane and hook up to pump air through the turbines when it's parked at the gate. On the older model planes, it runs ac and heat and stuff.
Bar none, that is the LOUDEST f-ing thing I've ever dealt with ever. It was so loud the vibrations from from just standing around it used to make the muscles in my chest cavity ache.
I was always scared shitless that something was gonna come loose in it and it was gonna blow apart, but it never did.
Dude, have you EVER stood next to a jet engine?
I used to work at an airport, I have.
Hearing protection only helps to an extent.
Them shits is loud, son. A whole 'nother level of loud, yo.
word.
>people telling about the events in the movie or constantly laughing at bad places. ... that's actually fun
interestingly enough, that was the reason to see snakes on a plane in the theater. There's no way in hell I'd ever rent that, it was god-awful. But if you watch it in a room full of 100 other people mocking it mercilessly from beginning to end
yes, it is a prerequisite for most meaningful computing tasks, including using the internet.
so it makes since to make sure the kids at least know how to read and write before giving them a computer.
HERE HERE! You should have moved your list higher up in your post so it'd have been "above the fold".
... being involved, being a good parent, helping with the school work being involved, yeah, that helps, but it ain't a panacea, my friend. You'd be surprised how many of us parents are indeed, NOT ASSHOLES, and our kids STILL have problems in school ...
... well ... that does CHANGE the WAY you learn.
... and yes me and my kids have used computers since we were old enough to move a mouse, and I have a hunch.
.. anything abstract) our brains have become used to processing data differently ... at least those of us who have used information technology heavily from an early age (and possibly have a genetic predisposition as well).
I can't agree more, at least with the things in your list.
However
Mr. CEO has a point, but it's masked in a lot of bullcrap marketing-speak. Strip away all the pop-culture references about text messaging and iPods and the WII. Merely using technology does not make you smarter or dumber. However, using it ALL THE DAMN TIME since pretty much THE DAY YOU WERE BORN
Specifically, it changes the way your brain develops, the way your neurons form pathways or whatever. I'm not a doctor or a neuro-scientist or anything. I'm just a parent who had ADD when I was a kid, and whose kids now have ADD
Among other things, it's my understanding that our minds are formed through learning to predict stimulus-response type scenarios. Like when you're a baby, you learn to cry because you know that someone's gonna feed you, or remove your feces or what have you.
When it comes to processing symbolic information (i.e. learning to read, learning math, or language
What Mr. Techno-babble CEO is observing has not a damn thing to do with iPods and WIIs it has to do with the fact that we're bringing up a generation with a higher percentage of people whose minds have learned to process symbolic data differently. This will be a crisis, unless some real research gets in front of it, and we start learning how to effectively teach people who learn in these new ways.
That appears to be a Christian sex-toy site. No really, I think that's what it is. Ok then ... I think that's all I had to say on the subject.
I'm going to go spend some time off the tubes for a while, my brain hurts.
Two Words: Awesome Express
Day after day, this guy has to sell games to little bastards who can barely read the package, and can't tell how much change they're owed.
... Game Stop will fire him, no doubt, but with any luck he'll land a sweet "gamer community correspondent" gig with CNN, or write a book or something.
How much money do you think a manager of a Game Stop makes?
I don't really know, but I'd venture to guess, magnitudes less than most of the IT professionals commenting in this thread.
What do you think the guy had to lose, really? Did he really think his corporate masters were going to stand for FEWER sales where they could have been MORE? Hell no!
This guy knew full well WTF he was doing, and it was absolutely brilliant.
He made his statement, and got his 15 minutes
If you've got to burn out of your just-barely-more-than-minimum-wage job, I can't think of a better way to do it, and with flourish, no less.
excellently played, sir. Bravo!
NO, it's not some nefarious "let's create the demand so people will buy it" nonsense.
... you know unless they could make one that wasn't going to have a disk crap out ... so there's a demand for iPods that don't have disk drives.
It's durability, plain and simple.
Look, putting a delicate little spinning disk in your pocket and carrying it with you everywhere you go, WHILE IT'S RUNNING, is just a bad f-ing idea. If you try dancing around with it like the guy in the commercial, it's just plain idiotic.
Three HD based iPods have died for me *on schedule* after 1 year of continuous use (within days of the 1 yeas anniversary in fact). The first time, it was a week early, so I got a free replacement with my AppleCare plan, the second time it was 2 weeks late, so I had to buy a new one. When that one died, I swore off iPods
Okay there, buddy ...
... I belive El Jobso was adopted.
So when some day you collapse in a crowded restaraunt, who is going to rush to the sceene, charge up the defibrulator and save your life?
Who is going to *design* the defibrulator that saved your life?
Who is going to perform cardiac surgery for you?
Answer: someone else's kids.
Human society is a web of dependance, the continued existence of which, depends on intelegent people procreating and taking the time and energy to raise productive individuals who can contrubute back to that web.
everybody gets old.
It floors me how a lot of the time, the same people who will tell you that we urgently need to colonize other planets because the human race is too precious and rare to take the risk that it could be wiped out by a planet-wide catastrophe, are the same folks who are unwilling to contribute their time and energy in the here and now to do their part to perpetuate humanity.
If you can't contribute your genetic material, there's always adoption.
And to bring it back on topic
> They are a band that 'gets it'
*yawn* ... wake me up when they submit sources for one of their tracks to the creative commons for remixing (at ccMixter.org).
Trent, we get it that you're depressed and all, why not let people REALLY go wild with one of your tracks? It might cheer you up, and all the cool kids are doing it, anyhow:
The Beastie Boys did it.
Fort Minor did it.
Vieux Farka Toure did it.
DJ Vadim is doing it right now.
Why should I bother putting my time and creative energy into remixing your tracks, if I'm legally bound not to post it on my blog, make a music video with it and post it on youtube, or even burn CDs for my friends with it?
Indeed ... NIN / Resnor "almost get it".
Encouraging students to drop mathematics?
... "making new art history majors daily".
... at least at a subconscious level, I'm pretty sure that's going on with a lot of 'em.
Hell, the establishment has been doing this foerever!
What is the primary function of Statistics, Calculus and Diff-EQ classes in most universities?
Answer: weed out the "non-hard-core engineers", in other words
These subjects don't have to be hard. I realize that after going through the hell it took to get through them. In college at least, these things are presented in a way that is INTENTIONALLY OBTUSE.
First there's the shitty textbooks, which are intentionally shitty, in an attempt to sell a)study guides, b)subscriptions to "study help" websites.
Then there's the professors. Some are great. I had exactly one truely great math professor in college for Calc 2. Sure the material was challenging, but the approach wasn't, which is more than I can say for the rest of my math professors. They're sole motivation seemed to be to throw up barriers to understanding. Why? Hell I don't know for sure. My guess is at the core, it has something to do with being in the situaion where you have to daily give the knowlege away that makes you valuable in the marketplace
Almost nothing we teach in maths below graduate level is newer than 200 years old.
We should have learned how to teach it propperly by now.
Students have been "encouraged" to drop maths all along, so what's the big deal that we're saying it out loud now?
Queue the Vince McMahon Music ....
... these are APPLE lawers ... impecably dressed, chi-centered, zen-bhuddist, miso soup sipping legal ass kicking machines. They also tote the coolest damn industrial-designed breifcases you've ever seen.
... no chance in hell.
Apple beat the Beatles after like a 20 year court battle over the name "Apple".
Apple's lawyers are fueled by an enormous never ending supply of hipster money from it's iPod sales. These are no ordinary lawyers
no chance
10 > I hate this stupid fad
20 > I'm buying up over 10 records a week
30 > These kids do this out of nonconformism
40 > Disclaimer: I'm 20 years old
segfault: infinite recursion detected at line 40.
if you're not old enough to drink, you're not old enough to whine about these damn kids who don't understand vinyl. You're complaining about yourself dude.
> I can be doing this full-time instead of being someone else's bitch, err, employee.
... well I tried this too.
Heh
I think you'll find, as I did, that you are in fact, still someone's bitch. It's just that person is your customer now, where they were previously your employer.
I guess it depends on what your's specificaly in to. I tried contract programming, and got a real quick refresher in global market economics.
I took a "quick and easy" $200 "1 week" contract that balooned into a 6 week fiasco. Oh, my code was fine, but when you're on your own, every little thing is your problem. Specifically, the client coluldn't get it installed on his machine. Then he couldn't figgure out how to run it, then it ran "slow" (because he had some sort of super slow internet connection), etc, etc, etc.
6 weeks. $200.
And the guys in India and China would have done 10 weeks for $50. seriously.
The client felt like he got ripped, and so did I.
And thus my dreams of eventual self employment were dashed.
And I went back to working for the man.
Seriously.
... so it was just socially assumed he was some kind of pedophile or something. He quit after one year (I'm guessing because of the rumors and such). Thanks to that, I never got to take a real programming course in high school (he was the only teacher with the backgrouind for it ... it was a small town school in the 80's).
... not the flattering kind. You don't know anything about computers. Your IT guy (apparently) dosen't know anything about computers.
Think for a minute what it's like to be a MALE teacher, in an overwhelmingly FEMALE dominated arena. I had two male teachers growing up. One of them was involved in a real sex scandal. The other was an incredibly gifted math and computer science teacher with mediocre social skills. He was a geek, and into computers, and shy
So. You've been in this game long enough to make it up to administrator, and principal. All it takes is a *HINT* of impropriety to get your ass fired by the school board.
So some smartass teenagers make a myspace page about you
What would YOU do? You have a family to support, this is your livelihood.
Not saying everything the guy did was right, but try that shoe on the other foot for a minute. I think I understand where he was coming from.
Oh really?
So what company is going to foot the bill for building this alternative neutral backbone, when BY DEFINITION, they'll be making less money on it than their non-neutral competitors?
Building backbones is expensive.
Here's the thing about IT jobs. In most large to medium sized companies, they're probably 30% to 50% fluff. Like DOT workers, there's always a lot more "supervisors" than "guys diggin' the hole".
... we get to work ever increasing workloads, ridiculous timelines, and basically work ourselves into an early grave.
That's at once the wonderful and horrible thing about capitalism: everyone needs a job, even the unskilled, the incapable. This is not a recent phenomena, it's ALWAYS been this way. If you're a programmer and you work on a team just try and tell me it ain't true. There's always 2 or 3 guys who bust ass around the clock, and there are 5, 6, or 20 guys bullshittn' all day.
At least in the company where I work, Americans are not getting the fluff jobs, we're getting the "diggin' the hole" jobs. The reason is that these H1B guys come over willing to work for around $45 or $50k a year via some shaddy-ass contracting company. They've all got MULTIPLE masters degrees from universities, most often in Hyderbad (hope I'm spelling it correctly).
I don't know how smart these guys really are. I CAN'T TELL because most of the time the language barrier entials between 30% and 50% data loss in spoken conversation, with maybe a 5% to 10% gain using written communication like IM or email. Maybe they really are all super geniuses, but with that language barrier, I know for a fact most couldn't hack it in an entry level CS course at the local community college.
Maybe it's that language barrier, but my gut tells me it might be, perhaps "easier" to obtain graduate degrees from Indian universities. Or maybe these guys are just straight up lying about their education, I mean what are the chances of an employer's HR department calling an Indian university to verify the degree of a contractor, literally someone ELSE'S employee?
slim to none.
Either way, upper management doesn't care anyhow, they just filled a $120k/year seat for $50k/year and no benefits.
So these guys come in, and for as smart as they might or might not be, they're pieces that don't fit into the puzzle. Our development teams can't communicate effectively with them, we can't get them to solve problems for us. So, they ride a barstool or hang around the water cooler, and those of us who haven't been replaced (out of necessity -- SOMEONE has to dig the hole)
Frankly, it could just as easily go the other way. We could be working our H1-B folks into the ground while the American staff goofs. I've just never seen that in real life, but hell, I hear about it all the time, specially on slashdot. Maybe it's the industry I'm in, if I were in the business of building web applications based on java using "popular templating engine X", maybe it'd more likely to go the other way. I don't know.
From my perspective, these people are stealing our cheese. The only thing they're enabling is for cheap-ass companies to fill the inevitable number of slacker jobs in any organization with people working for less than half the going rate for locals. Don't kid yourself, this is a VERY BAD THING for our society.
Whatever you may think of the slackers in your organization, know that by and large, they use the money they make do to meaningful things outisde the office; to raise families, and take care of aging parents, etc. These are things that our societal safety net has to catch otherwise.
I have nothing against the people who come here on H1-B's, they're doing what everyone in the world does, just trying to make a living. The bottom line is, that Americans aren't "unwilling or unable" to do the work that we're bringing these people in to do, it's that we're not even being offered the opportunity to in a lot of cases. In our own country.
The madness must stop.
Either that or I should just breakdown and start learning Hindi now, to avoid the rush in about 10 years when that's where all the GOOD jobs have gone.
So I've been telecommuting since Summer for a giant telco.
... 0%.
... a real dad now, instead of the dude who gets out of the house at sunup and shows up just before bedtime.
... if you were never management material to start with, it's probably worth the "risk".
I worked in the corporate HQ for about 8 years before I started the telecommuting, and honestly it wasn't by choice. I just had to start doing it, because my workload skyrocketed, no new help was hired, and my friends just wouldn't stop wasting my time in the office.
Is it hurting my chances for promotion? Chance for promotion before telecommuting 0%, chances for promotion after telecommuting
At least in this company, when you're technically competent and people depend on you, that's a virtual guarantee that you'll be doing the exact same thing you're doing presently for your entire length of employment.
Telecommuting is a fantastic lifestyle. I gave up my social life at work, but in return, I got my family back. I'm like
If I didn't get more work done this way, though it'd never work, and I'd be looking at a lot worse than "no promotion".
If your considdering telecommuting:
A) know and understand the "risks" to your "career"
B) I can't emphasise this enough: Make a separate space in your home for working.
When you enter this space, you're at work. When you leave this space, you're at home. Do NOT enter this space on your free time FOR ANY REASON. Keep your personal and work life physically separated. Otherwise your life will turn into a nightmareish comingling of work and personal time. You'll go nuts in 6 weeks flat.
Well ... you see the thing is, that there are a LOT more people in the world who want a big ass expensive status symbol than there are that want a "useful, hackable mini-computer".
That is why the iPod beat the pants off of Nomad.
It's also why Hummer is actually able to sell cars, even with the crazy high gas prices.
Apple marketing is pure evil genius.
Edwin would be proud.