"They're getting more done. They're getting more work assigned to them."
This is true. In factories, managers do this to always be able to report "progress" to their managers. In one factory I worked in, we did 800 widgets in one day--the next week the new quota was 1200. It got to the point where we never met the new quotas, so they sent in the "engineers" to study us, time us, and "optimize" the workflow. This is generally quite bad for morale.
Professional contractors (in IT or any industry, really) mitigate this by "managing the customer's expectations." Experienced contractors know all the white lies to tell to ensure they don't run out of work too soon, nor take on too much work to finish. All the while, the customer is left pleased with the results, no matter what the result is. It's really amazing to see this in action.
"most of them desire someone who can "multitask"."
Don't forget the implicit requirement of being under 30 years old while simultaneously having 5+ years experience in *each* of Java,.NET, LAMP, Windows Server 2003, COBOL, etc. Age discrimination is very real (seen it affect several people I know), and there is this mythos of the IT superman who is young and brilliant at everything. It is often hard or impossible to live up to the idealism present in the IT industry.
The fact that we are better off now than 100 years ago does not mean that our descendants will be better off than we are.
There is a real possibility that so many people will be engaged in the economies of MMORPG games that we will be unable to keep up with the fundamental economies of farming, mining, and manufacturing. We'll all be complaining about working and shopping at Wal-Mart, yet go home to fire up the broadband connection for five hours of pure escapism before bedtime.
I wonder if another frontier for unionization will be healthcare. While nurses have a long tradition of unionization, practically no other healthcare workers do, and hospitals are, ironically, starting to feel the pinch of their own employee healthcare benefits, along with grappling with increasingly uncompliant insurance programs and Medicaid. It also seems IT in hospitals doesn't often get the respect it needs, which adds to the burden on staff, who have to deal with difficult and/or unreliable computer systems.
Already, people have to wade through piles of "what I ate for breakfast" entries to see a handful of truly interesting ones. It could be said, the crap has arrived, dried out, been stepped on, and eaten by an animal for reprocessing. Should this new trend be called Crap: The Re-Emergence?
On a related note, does anyone know what's the deal with the canned herring steaks? The last few cans I bought were packed with little crappy herring, which was pretty disappointing. I prefer the steaks over sardines, but I guess I'll have to catch more sales on the kippered snacks (yummy).
I really liked the Advantage and got really good at using it. It lasted a long time for me back in the day, but when I tried out my NES recently after it sat many years, the Advantage was somehow all gummed up. I remember how many Atari 2600 controllers I broke, and how many controllers I went through with the Commodore 64...somehow all my original NES gear still works minus the Advantage.
One T2000 server (T1/Niagara based) running at 1 GHz trounces a two-way Xeon server at 2.8 GHz for serving dynamic websites (PHP in this case). This was discussed at OSNews this week.
Sun really needs to get the message out about the T1 servers. I'd like to make some money off of my SUNW shares sometime this decade...
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Your job is symptomatic. The GP post has described "Human Resources" to a precision not yet achieved in other Slashdot posts.
"They're getting more done. They're getting more work assigned to them."
This is true. In factories, managers do this to always be able to report "progress" to their managers. In one factory I worked in, we did 800 widgets in one day--the next week the new quota was 1200. It got to the point where we never met the new quotas, so they sent in the "engineers" to study us, time us, and "optimize" the workflow. This is generally quite bad for morale.
Professional contractors (in IT or any industry, really) mitigate this by "managing the customer's expectations." Experienced contractors know all the white lies to tell to ensure they don't run out of work too soon, nor take on too much work to finish. All the while, the customer is left pleased with the results, no matter what the result is. It's really amazing to see this in action.
"most of them desire someone who can "multitask"."
.NET, LAMP, Windows Server 2003, COBOL, etc. Age discrimination is very real (seen it affect several people I know), and there is this mythos of the IT superman who is young and brilliant at everything. It is often hard or impossible to live up to the idealism present in the IT industry.
Don't forget the implicit requirement of being under 30 years old while simultaneously having 5+ years experience in *each* of Java,
The fact that we are better off now than 100 years ago does not mean that our descendants will be better off than we are.
There is a real possibility that so many people will be engaged in the economies of MMORPG games that we will be unable to keep up with the fundamental economies of farming, mining, and manufacturing. We'll all be complaining about working and shopping at Wal-Mart, yet go home to fire up the broadband connection for five hours of pure escapism before bedtime.
I wonder if another frontier for unionization will be healthcare. While nurses have a long tradition of unionization, practically no other healthcare workers do, and hospitals are, ironically, starting to feel the pinch of their own employee healthcare benefits, along with grappling with increasingly uncompliant insurance programs and Medicaid. It also seems IT in hospitals doesn't often get the respect it needs, which adds to the burden on staff, who have to deal with difficult and/or unreliable computer systems.
Already, people have to wade through piles of "what I ate for breakfast" entries to see a handful of truly interesting ones. It could be said, the crap has arrived, dried out, been stepped on, and eaten by an animal for reprocessing. Should this new trend be called Crap: The Re-Emergence?
On a related note, does anyone know what's the deal with the canned herring steaks? The last few cans I bought were packed with little crappy herring, which was pretty disappointing. I prefer the steaks over sardines, but I guess I'll have to catch more sales on the kippered snacks (yummy).
I really liked the Advantage and got really good at using it. It lasted a long time for me back in the day, but when I tried out my NES recently after it sat many years, the Advantage was somehow all gummed up. I remember how many Atari 2600 controllers I broke, and how many controllers I went through with the Commodore 64...somehow all my original NES gear still works minus the Advantage.
One T2000 server (T1/Niagara based) running at 1 GHz trounces a two-way Xeon server at 2.8 GHz for serving dynamic websites (PHP in this case). This was discussed at OSNews this week.
Sun really needs to get the message out about the T1 servers. I'd like to make some money off of my SUNW shares sometime this decade...