Oh please. Within a 20 mile radius I can find 400 companies employing IT staff. Within a 20 mile radius of my home I can find another 200.
Is a HR reference stating "Yes, he worked here between X and Y." really going to influence getting a job at random employer from 600? No.
Will it potentially reduce the chances of joining a specific company? Possibly. Anecdotally I hear of and meet far more people that got a job through networking/contacts/previous colleagues than ever failed to either get one or employ someone as a result of the same influences.
Any such "give them a job or not" decisions are mostly binary anyway - employers offer the market rate to get the CV in, they don't drop the salary offer afterwards based on a reference.
A multitude of competing employers are competing for a finite resource : competent employees. Trust me, there are too few to go around and it's worth paying a little extra to attract the good ones. And thus the market responds to supply and demand...
I will continue to seek, apply for and accept jobs that meet my expectations around working conditions, nature of the role, work/life balance and reward (financial and otherwise).
If I reach the stage where I can't find any then I'll consider my options. They may be to accept lower rewards, to switch careers, to retire or take up arms against my oppressor.
Maybe the job was overpaid. Maybe there's a glut of intelligent people capable of rational thought. Possibly, just possibly, most IT jobs aren't that hard.
Deal with it. Learn the more obscure skillsets, where demand exceeds availability. Specialise. Move into more senior roles.
Or switch profession. Become an accountant, or a doctor, or a plumber.
Or just do something you enjoy. Who said you had to get rich from it.
Unionisation will not prevent salaries from falling. If anything it would increase offshore outsourcing. When an entire industry loses its market value trying to prop up your salary through unionisation merely accelerates the decline.
Your union bargains on your behalf, and when a settlement is reached YOU VOTE on it. If a majority of members vote it down, it goes back to negotiation. If the "bosses" decide a strike is in order, YOU VOTE ON IT.
Unfortunately I don't have the same goals and desires as everybody else. I don't want childcare, I definitely don't want age related pay, I do want rewarding for contribution, I do want a trust relationship between myself, my manager and my staff.
I need a union that will represent me. That means it needs me and only people like me in it. That'd be me. Rather than unionise I kind of go informal and represent myself.
It's strange, this approach seems to keep me better paid and working in better conditions than most unionised staff. Even at the same company.
Out of confused curiosity, how does unionisation prevent outsourcing?
Today you work for company A. You join the "I hate my boss Union". Tomorrow company A agrees an outsourced IT contract with company B. You get TUPEd across to company B. You're now in the "I hate my boss Union" but you now work for company B. Company B tells you that it's moved your role offshore. You choose whether to move to India (and switch to an Indian salary) or get made redundant.
The big flaw in your argument is that employers do not form a monopsony.
(Which is, incidentally, a fucking shit term)
There are many industries that employ IT people. There are many companies in each industry. There are many types of IT job. There are many tens of thousands of employers. You really think they all collude on the wages of their IT staff? I think not.
If an employer offers low wages then people do something very strange. They join another employer that's offering a better wage.
Funny that. You'd almost think there's a functioning economy.
Companies are screaming out for people with the right skills and abilities. Even now the market is strong.
I hate having unions negotiate collective agreements. I'm not normal. I'm not female with children. I haven't worked at the company for 28 years. I don't give a flying fuck about getting exactly an hour for lunch.
I also hate competing with offshore IT people for jobs. I hate competing with immigrant IT people for jobs. Hell, I hate competing for jobs, it takes effort.
Yet I still have a job I want, because I add enough value to justify my employment. I'm good at what I do. I take pride in it. My company benefits significantly from my work, and as a result I benefit too.
It's not as it should be. Obviously someone should pay me a substantial wage to piss around all day browsing Slashdot. Give me a yell, I'm open to offers. Until then..
We have a virtual team of 120 people including around 2 dozen fulltime resources on business requirements gathering, analysis, definition, business rules documentation, process mapping, understanding the rules implemented in the existing systems, in new packages, etc.
That's rather more people than we'll have writing code. It needs to be. Writing code is easy.
This is one reason coding games is as easy as coding business applications. The code is the easy part of each.
Oddly the military doctrine I encountered is that shooting to wound is the ideal - a wounded man needs several comrades to get him to the medical support, which puts multiple people out of the fight, and dead people piss their mates off.
Ah, Company of Heroes.. I first played it on a, lets say, demo version.
I've since bought Dawn of War twice (including for a friend), Company of Heroes (for a friend), Opposing Forces, a download version of Company of Heroes and one of the Dawn of War expansion packs.
Had I been forced to pay for the original Company of Heroes to try it out I probably wouldn't have bought any of those.
Not exactly. If someone is close to you in your network then you can see their contacts, but not the contact details. You can pay LinkedIn to send a message to them but that's rather less useful than having their email address/phone number at hand.
Around 90% of the requests hitting the website of a travel company I recently worked for were from scrapers/spiders.
The profit generated from these was less than the cost of serving those requests.
We basically tiered them by profit margin, made deals to provide the ones that made us money with a better service (more timely information for them, less load on our website for us) and tried to block the rest.
You'd be surprised how tricky this can be.
(You'd also be surpirsed how tricky getting price comparison websites to accept a direct API rather than screenscraping can be.)
When you're having to boost the capacity of your web infrastructure by an order of magnitude to cope with the scrapers that's a significant cost, especially in the travel industry - margins of 2-6% are the norm, and that doesn't leave a lot of cash for hardware.
oh, ffs, the shakes were commonplace on muds in the early 90s. And they were far more balanced than fucking eve.
As someone that lacks the time to spend months building up to buying a new ship that I can subsequently lose in a few seconds to someone that merely happens to have spent a few years building up a fleet of ships I'll happily admit that Eve holds no interest to me.
If I want an adrenaline rush I'll do something that puts me in physical jeopardy. I wont invest several months of online play in the hopes of getting lucky (i.e. not bumping into a well geared pirate).
Now there's a crass assumption. Plus of course, it's perfectly possible to be male and against sexism, or black and against racism. Although affirmative action may be sexist or racist it's possible to be a black woman and against affirmative action.
I'm not a black woman.
I'm struggling to understand why you're even trying to argue here. Your points are poor, you're quoting US statistics in response to my UK ones, you've making false assumptions about me, and attacking me personally. What exactly is your point here?
My point is that affirmative action on the basis of gender is sexist. The link I provided confirms that definition of sexism (while also providing others - fortunately I've been on Slashdot long enough to know that there can be many answers). You haven't disproved that.
She might also be basing it on the study that women earn less than men in the same jobs, even when corrected for experience, time, benefits, etc.
Except that the study sadly didn't show that. Oops.
The study did show that women working part time earn significantly less per hour than men working full time. Which is the statistic she quoted to justify this foolish suggestion.
Obviously this loses its significance when you correct for experience, time, benefits, etc - oh, and whether the job is full or part time. Because at that point, the study shows that the corrected earnings per hour for women are higher than men.
Again, this is because you think discrimination=sexism. It doesn't.
Even taking your unusually narrow view of what constitutes sexism, "Affirmative action" invariably involves somebody in a position of power discriminating against another person.
If the legislation stated that it was fine to pay women 20% less than men because women get maternity leave and men don't, and because women take more sick leave than men, then it would be discriminatory and sexist.
Maternity leave itself is sexist. Why should women get so many months off on full pay because of a lifestyle choice? Sweden offer men equal rights in this area, why can't other countries.
If legislation is brought in that permits favouring women over men when recruiting then it is discriminatory and sexist.
I don't think these are complicated concepts.
Because if your salary is the only possible consideration you could have when deciding whether to have a penis or not, then you probably should base your decisions on that.
You may be amazed to discover that it's possible to change your legal gender without taking any medication or receiving any surgical alterations at all. Legal gender does not have to resemble physical characteristics.
Please stop using the term 'affirmative action' and use its real name: discrimination.
The UK Minister for Equal Opportunities wants to make it legal to discriminate against men, on the basis that men get higher pay than women.
Of course, the report she's basing this one notes that women in part time work get paid a higher rate per hour than men in part time work do.
Quite how this justifies discriminating against men in pay and job offers I'm personally a little confused. Lets just say I know how to get my gender legally changed and if necessary, I will.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please. Within a 20 mile radius I can find 400 companies employing IT staff. Within a 20 mile radius of my home I can find another 200.
Is a HR reference stating "Yes, he worked here between X and Y." really going to influence getting a job at random employer from 600? No.
Will it potentially reduce the chances of joining a specific company? Possibly. Anecdotally I hear of and meet far more people that got a job through networking/contacts/previous colleagues than ever failed to either get one or employ someone as a result of the same influences.
Any such "give them a job or not" decisions are mostly binary anyway - employers offer the market rate to get the CV in, they don't drop the salary offer afterwards based on a reference.
A multitude of competing employers are competing for a finite resource : competent employees. Trust me, there are too few to go around and it's worth paying a little extra to attract the good ones. And thus the market responds to supply and demand...
Not at all.
I will continue to seek, apply for and accept jobs that meet my expectations around working conditions, nature of the role, work/life balance and reward (financial and otherwise).
If I reach the stage where I can't find any then I'll consider my options. They may be to accept lower rewards, to switch careers, to retire or take up arms against my oppressor.
Probably not that last one.
So your current job gets outsourced. Congratulations, pick up the juicy redundancy and find a better one.
The jobs are there, even in this recession.
Oddly you don't need to spend a penny to get to an employment tribunal.
To go beyond that can be fairly cheap too.
If they're broken the law, it wont ever go that far anyway.
"You can't do that to me - it's illegal" unions
You don't need a union to prevent your company doing something illegal to you. It's one of the joys of the law.
Oh no, the industry is maturing! How terrible.
Maybe the job was overpaid. Maybe there's a glut of intelligent people capable of rational thought. Possibly, just possibly, most IT jobs aren't that hard.
Deal with it. Learn the more obscure skillsets, where demand exceeds availability. Specialise. Move into more senior roles.
Or switch profession. Become an accountant, or a doctor, or a plumber.
Or just do something you enjoy. Who said you had to get rich from it.
Unionisation will not prevent salaries from falling. If anything it would increase offshore outsourcing. When an entire industry loses its market value trying to prop up your salary through unionisation merely accelerates the decline.
Your union bargains on your behalf, and when a settlement is reached YOU VOTE on it. If a majority of members vote it down, it goes back to negotiation. If the "bosses" decide a strike is in order, YOU VOTE ON IT.
Unfortunately I don't have the same goals and desires as everybody else. I don't want childcare, I definitely don't want age related pay, I do want rewarding for contribution, I do want a trust relationship between myself, my manager and my staff.
I need a union that will represent me. That means it needs me and only people like me in it. That'd be me. Rather than unionise I kind of go informal and represent myself.
It's strange, this approach seems to keep me better paid and working in better conditions than most unionised staff. Even at the same company.
I must be doing something wrong..
Out of confused curiosity, how does unionisation prevent outsourcing?
Today you work for company A. You join the "I hate my boss Union".
Tomorrow company A agrees an outsourced IT contract with company B.
You get TUPEd across to company B. You're now in the "I hate my boss Union" but you now work for company B.
Company B tells you that it's moved your role offshore. You choose whether to move to India (and switch to an Indian salary) or get made redundant.
The union just hasn't really helped here.
The big flaw in your argument is that employers do not form a monopsony.
(Which is, incidentally, a fucking shit term)
There are many industries that employ IT people.
There are many companies in each industry.
There are many types of IT job.
There are many tens of thousands of employers. You really think they all collude on the wages of their IT staff? I think not.
If an employer offers low wages then people do something very strange. They join another employer that's offering a better wage.
Funny that. You'd almost think there's a functioning economy.
Add more than $2/hour of value.
Companies are screaming out for people with the right skills and abilities. Even now the market is strong.
I hate having unions negotiate collective agreements. I'm not normal. I'm not female with children. I haven't worked at the company for 28 years. I don't give a flying fuck about getting exactly an hour for lunch.
I also hate competing with offshore IT people for jobs. I hate competing with immigrant IT people for jobs. Hell, I hate competing for jobs, it takes effort.
Yet I still have a job I want, because I add enough value to justify my employment. I'm good at what I do. I take pride in it. My company benefits significantly from my work, and as a result I benefit too.
It's not as it should be. Obviously someone should pay me a substantial wage to piss around all day browsing Slashdot. Give me a yell, I'm open to offers. Until then..
wtf? You're really saying the Mazda is better than a Lotus Elise?
Disentangling the rules, one person?
Fuck me.
We have a virtual team of 120 people including around 2 dozen fulltime resources on business requirements gathering, analysis, definition, business rules documentation, process mapping, understanding the rules implemented in the existing systems, in new packages, etc.
That's rather more people than we'll have writing code. It needs to be. Writing code is easy.
This is one reason coding games is as easy as coding business applications. The code is the easy part of each.
Oddly the military doctrine I encountered is that shooting to wound is the ideal - a wounded man needs several comrades to get him to the medical support, which puts multiple people out of the fight, and dead people piss their mates off.
the victim ran from heavily armed police
No, he did not.
the terrorists created an environment where someone carrying a backpack can be perceived as a deadly threat
Only by people too stupid and too irresponsible to be allowed to carry firearms.
This is not a Miss Marple murder mystery. We know who the fucking murderer is. We just don't seem to be able to get justice for the innocent victim.
Ah, Company of Heroes.. I first played it on a, lets say, demo version.
I've since bought Dawn of War twice (including for a friend), Company of Heroes (for a friend), Opposing Forces, a download version of Company of Heroes and one of the Dawn of War expansion packs.
Had I been forced to pay for the original Company of Heroes to try it out I probably wouldn't have bought any of those.
DRM really does impact game purchase decisions.
Not exactly. If someone is close to you in your network then you can see their contacts, but not the contact details. You can pay LinkedIn to send a message to them but that's rather less useful than having their email address/phone number at hand.
"Film at 11" predates Slashdot by a fair few years. Check the Jargon File..
You have to pay per bag. Thus your baggage allowance is 0.
Around 90% of the requests hitting the website of a travel company I recently worked for were from scrapers/spiders.
The profit generated from these was less than the cost of serving those requests.
We basically tiered them by profit margin, made deals to provide the ones that made us money with a better service (more timely information for them, less load on our website for us) and tried to block the rest.
You'd be surprised how tricky this can be.
(You'd also be surpirsed how tricky getting price comparison websites to accept a direct API rather than screenscraping can be.)
When you're having to boost the capacity of your web infrastructure by an order of magnitude to cope with the scrapers that's a significant cost, especially in the travel industry - margins of 2-6% are the norm, and that doesn't leave a lot of cash for hardware.
Actually I'd say he's described Ryanair fairly accurately.
You can always work back up
I already work far too long each week. I use the money it earns to pay for computer games.
They're a leisure activity. I play them because they're fun.
Not work.
Odd concept, one the designers of Eve forgot to include..
oh, ffs, the shakes were commonplace on muds in the early 90s. And they were far more balanced than fucking eve.
As someone that lacks the time to spend months building up to buying a new ship that I can subsequently lose in a few seconds to someone that merely happens to have spent a few years building up a fleet of ships I'll happily admit that Eve holds no interest to me.
If I want an adrenaline rush I'll do something that puts me in physical jeopardy. I wont invest several months of online play in the hopes of getting lucky (i.e. not bumping into a well geared pirate).
Oh, weep for poor Whitey!
Now there's a crass assumption. Plus of course, it's perfectly possible to be male and against sexism, or black and against racism. Although affirmative action may be sexist or racist it's possible to be a black woman and against affirmative action.
I'm not a black woman.
I'm struggling to understand why you're even trying to argue here. Your points are poor, you're quoting US statistics in response to my UK ones, you've making false assumptions about me, and attacking me personally. What exactly is your point here?
My point is that affirmative action on the basis of gender is sexist. The link I provided confirms that definition of sexism (while also providing others - fortunately I've been on Slashdot long enough to know that there can be many answers). You haven't disproved that.
She might also be basing it on the study that women earn less than men in the same jobs, even when corrected for experience, time, benefits, etc.
Except that the study sadly didn't show that. Oops.
The study did show that women working part time earn significantly less per hour than men working full time. Which is the statistic she quoted to justify this foolish suggestion.
Obviously this loses its significance when you correct for experience, time, benefits, etc - oh, and whether the job is full or part time. Because at that point, the study shows that the corrected earnings per hour for women are higher than men.
Again, this is because you think discrimination=sexism. It doesn't.
If someone is discriminated against on the basis of gender then it is sexism. Shit, check http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sexism if you don't believe me.
Even taking your unusually narrow view of what constitutes sexism, "Affirmative action" invariably involves somebody in a position of power discriminating against another person.
If the legislation stated that it was fine to pay women 20% less than men because women get maternity leave and men don't, and because women take more sick leave than men, then it would be discriminatory and sexist.
Maternity leave itself is sexist. Why should women get so many months off on full pay because of a lifestyle choice? Sweden offer men equal rights in this area, why can't other countries.
If legislation is brought in that permits favouring women over men when recruiting then it is discriminatory and sexist.
I don't think these are complicated concepts.
Because if your salary is the only possible consideration you could have when deciding whether to have a penis or not, then you probably should base your decisions on that.
You may be amazed to discover that it's possible to change your legal gender without taking any medication or receiving any surgical alterations at all. Legal gender does not have to resemble physical characteristics.
Please stop using the term 'affirmative action' and use its real name: discrimination.
The UK Minister for Equal Opportunities wants to make it legal to discriminate against men, on the basis that men get higher pay than women.
Of course, the report she's basing this one notes that women in part time work get paid a higher rate per hour than men in part time work do.
Quite how this justifies discriminating against men in pay and job offers I'm personally a little confused. Lets just say I know how to get my gender legally changed and if necessary, I will.