The only thing expensive about having kids is day care / preschool, which is pricey. But if one parent doesn't work, then they can take care of the kids. If both parents work, then it's a two-income household, and most should be able to bear that cost. Single parents are truly screwed here.
I'm a little concerned that you can look at the quoted text and conclude that kids are not expensive. Are you ignoring the opportunity cost of having one parent stop working? That's lost income as well as loss of career path/experience. Not a trivial sacrifice at all.
Also, for what it's worth, kids don't magically become cheap/free once they start public school. You've got activities, summer camp, before/after school care if necessary, etc. Travel all of a sudden cost a ton more with extra tickets and hotel room. And your grocery budget is going to increase substantially once your kids are teenagers.
So I would still argue that kids can be pretty expensive.
It's worth pointing out that you don't qualify for EI in Canada if you are actually fired or leave a job willingly.
The situation is the same in the US. Resignations and terminations for cause are not covered by unemployment.
Luckily (depending on your point of view) nobody gets fired, they get laid off.
In the US, it really depends on the firm.
Here, companies get the unemployment insurance premiums raised when claims are paid, so there is a direct impact to the employer for doing layoffs. Larger employers don't really care about the premium hit because their internal process for terminating someone for cause is more expensive than just paying the increased premium. You have to waste the manager's time and HR's time on a performance improvement plan. You have to pay the employee's salary/benefits/taxes during that time, when you'd rather just ax them. And you have to waste time fighting the unemployment office when they try to characterize it as a layoff, anyway. That's way more than the premium increase.
Smaller firms are much more likely to terminate for cause and respond if the former employee files a wrongful claim for unemployment. This is mostly because it's more personal. The owner is going to be responding to the unemployment office, and the owner is going to be the one who is pissed off at the former employee, so he/she is definitely not going to let that person get unemployment willingly.
This is the interesting part, is the volatility necessarily short-term? Given that the market consists or 'true' investors and speculators/HFTs at any given time, and that they interact, couldn't the effects be longer-term?
Personally, I see no problem with volatility for the retail buy-and-hold investor. Not short term volatility, and not long term volatility.
The buy-and-hold investor isn't concerned with what the stock/ETF/mutual fund/whatever will be worth tomorrow, next week, or even next year. Personally, I think a good strategy for that type of investor (i.e. me, and probably you, as well) is to buy low-fee, broad, diversified ETFs monthly and automatically, dollar-cost averaging along the way. Using this simple technique, all of that volatility is irrelevant. In 10 years, I'm not going to care about all of the ups and downs that happened between when I bought and when I sold. And even when I sell, I'm not going to care if the ETF is bumping around a bit, because I bought it 10 years ago.
In the case of individual stocks, volatility and especially correlation can be his friend. After all, if he has evaluated a company and likes its financials, management, and potential business opportunities, he's going to want to buy when the market has punished the stock for no reason other than some European central banker raised an eyebrow during a speech and sent the whole market into a tizzy. Personally, I do not invest in individual stocks because I find it to be labor-intensive with respect to expected returns (I can make much more money spending my time growing my business than in stock picking), and it is very risky (I can try to evaluate a company, and I'm halfway decent at it, given my background in economics and as a business owner, but it's hard to know for sure, and the penalty for being wrong can be a 75-100% loss, easy).
So, days later, my opinion is that volatility is not a problem for retail investors, especially when you factor in the benefit of added liquidity. As a retail investor myself, I am not bothered by it.
I learned J2EE along the way. It includes some of the worst APIs I've had the displeasure of using.
No doubt. J2EE's byzantine API and reams of boilerplate code (which begot even more reams of generated code) and really, really stupid architecture decisions ensured that nobody would ever implement a full-stack J2EE system. I mean, just take Entity EJBs, for example. The persistent objects were not serializable, so you couldn't use them outside of the service layer. You had to map the entire object graph to and from serializable value objects. That decision alone pretty much spawned Hibernate. And the reams of boiletplate code spawned the Spring framework.
Everything has changed since the J2EE days. Now, Java EE has learned from the community's experience and the framework is now much more usable. JPA is pretty nice, and the annotations support did so much to reduce all of the boilerplate code/configuration. Java and its associated frameworks are getting away from the "write a ton of useless code" model. The success of Ruby on Rails I think was a big wakeup call in that regard.
You can do the responsible thing and sleep in a non operational seat with your keys more than an arms length away and not in the ignition. That demonstrates that you had no intent of operating your car.
This is Minnesota we're talking about. I hear it's cold there, and it might be nice to have the heat on.
Also it helps if you don't have three other prior convictions for DWI.
If you have 3 priors, you probably don't have a license anymore, anyway. And if you do, then you shouldn't. But that's a separate issue.
if you're drunk and in your car and get caught i have no sympathy for you.
It's attitudes like this that cause people to drive drunk.
If someone's drunk and wants to do the responsible thing (i.e. sleep it off and not drive until sober), there is no incentive to do that because the penalty for waiting until sober is the same as the penalty for driving drunk. So might as well drive drunk and roll the dice.
Does that makes sense? Fuck no. It makes no sense whatsoever for a stock or a commodity to be traded in nanosecond timeframes. It's asinine. There is no possible way for this to make any sense whatsoever.
You sound very convinced that trades being made rapidly is a bad thing. Why? What difference does it make if a trade is executed in nanoseconds, milliseconds, or seconds?
So, the question is, how fast do trades have to be?
How slow do trades have to be? What would we gain by that?
Here's a thing to think about though: the markets close every day for hours, and the economy doesn't suddenly collapse due to this suspension of "liquidity". Hence, the logical conclusion is that trades could be performed as infrequently as once an hour, and nothing would really change.
Not to blow your mind or anything, but have you heard of after-hours trading? You'd love it because there isn't much liquidity, but most investors avoid it like the plague because.. well.. there's little liquidity, and securities are priced very inefficiently. The after-hours markets are rife with manipulation. Trading in thinly-traded markets is not for the weak-stomached.
Personally, I don't see the point of after-hours trading, but I'm not going to argue for its elimination. Clearly someone has a use for it, so more power to them. Wake me in 15 years when I'm ready to start selling my stock.
Out of curiosity, how would someone in practical real life terms use this millisecond liquidity, as opposed to say, being limited to five seconds or such.
Since you are the one who is arguing for adding 5 seconds of artificial delays into the system, perhaps the onus should be on you to prove that this artificial inefficiency is somehow useful.
And let's not whine about market crashes, which anyway happened long before automated trading.
Also, do we really want lower transaction costs? They might shave pennies or even dollars off a stock market trade, but if the point of the stock market is investment in a company (rather that shifting wealth around) wouldn't we want incentive to stay vested in a company?
Stock market transactions used to be enormously expensive. To illustrate my point, let's ponder "then vs. now" what it would cost you to buy 100 shares of XYZ for $25. And by the way, back then, you had to buy/sell in multiples of 100 shares because most brokers wouldn't let you trade odd lots, and those that did charged a fee for it.
Then, you paid $50 in commission and had a bid/ask spread of $0.25. So that $2500 purchase would cost you $50 in commission and $12.50 in the bid/ask spread (I'm allocating half to the purchase and half to the sale), or $62.50, which is 2.5% of the value of what you bought. Add another 2.5% for when you sell, and that's a 5% loss just for investing at all.
Now, you pay $7 or 8 bucks a trade with penny spreads, on heavily-traded securities. 0.36% on each buy/sell.
I don't care if you're holding for 10 years or 10 seconds. Nobody wants to pay his broker and extra 4.28%
Again, I'm open to being proven otherwise, it's just I don't see what value they add. They don't hold onto the stock long enough for the real investors to use the capital they put into the market. They just seem to drive up the cost for real investors....
Could you more carefully explain what you mean about "holding onto the stock long enough for real investors to use the capital they put into the market"? That isn't making sense to me, but anyway, I think I've just shown that cost is lower now for real investors.
What HFTs do add, in addition to liquidity, is volatility. But it's not clear to me why "real investors" should care about short-term volatility. If you or I buy some stock and hold it for 15 years, neither of us is going to care that on 5/10/2019 (or any other day), trading happened to be really volatile.
Cuban was complaining about the flash crash, which granted, is not something that you want to have happen. But again, did you care about the flash crash? I didn't. I didn't do any trading that day. Or the day before. Or the day after. Or probably any day within a few months of the flash crash. Did my portfolio's value go down that day? Sure. And then it went back up again. Who cares?
But I'll definitely take my low transaction costs, please!
Again, that can get you sued, since it's obviously a ploy to trash a former employee's reputation.
Anything can get you sued. Do you have any examples of damages being awarded for saying that a former employee is ineligible for rehire? Because that's not subjective. They either are, or they are not, and it's nothing that the former employee can really quibble with.
Finally, calling a previous employer is stupid anyway. Why do you think the employee is leaving the former employer? If it was such a great place to work, then obviously he'd still be working there. He left because there was some sort of disagreement, and employers almost always hate it when an employee leaves them (even if it's because their pay sucks). What do you think you're going to hear when you call them up? A glowing review?
I've heard all manner of things calling former employers and former landlords.
But to answer your question, I'm not an idiot. I don't call current employer (unless applicant tells me to) because they normally don't know that the employee is looking. The employer before that generally has no ax to grind, and anyway, if the applicant has more than 2 brain cells and left that employer under bad terms, he or she is going to tell me what happened once it's clear that I'm going to call.
I don't expect a mistake-free past. Lord knows I'd fail that test. But I do expect people to own up to their mistakes and learn from them.
Interesting, I guess that explains why a US friend of mine suggested I remove the references section from my resume. It was quite shocking to me - round here, nobody would think of hiring you without a few good references.
It used to be customary to put "References available upon request" on resumes in the US. The latest advice is not to include that, since it's assumed that references will be available upon request. It just wastes space.
Employers definitely still call references in the US.
Such a contract would never be enforceable in America; it's called "right to work". In most states, the employer can fire you at any time without cause (as long as it isn't discriminatory; i.e. they find out you're gay or had a kid or whatever), and similarly, you can quit your job at any time without cause.
Right to work means you don't have to join a union as a condition of employment. And being gay is not a protected class is most jurisdictions.
So what's happened now is that most companies have a policy of NEVER discussing old employees with any new employers, to avoid any problems; they will only do the minimum required by law: they'll verify your dates of employment, and that's it.
Which law compels employers to discuss any information about a former employee? I'm not aware of any.
I've called references and been called many times. For one thing, you'd be surprised at how many people will give the unvarnished truth about a problem former employee. But anyway, the issue of "can't give a negative reference without liability exposure" is easily circumvented. Most references (myself included) will happily answer dates of service, job title, and "eligible for rehire?". That way, there's nothing subjective about it. Either they're eligible, or they're not. No need to disclose why, and I recommend that you decline, if asked.
Sometimes unemployment benefits, both the size and duration, are a better option than a good job at a good wage.
Have you ever been on unemployment? I can't see how it would ever be better than a good job at a good wage. A crappy job at a crappy wage? Sure. But not a good job.
It's the same argument as with the muslims: if you don't want the extreme element of your organization to represent you, you should try being a little more vocal in your opposition when they spew their shit.
We try, but it's always the crackpots who command the attention. The Becks and the Limbaughs and the Palins of the world are the ones who sell the ad slots, so they are the ones you see on TV. Pity.
Also, I have to admit that explaining conservative positions to liberals gets a little old. What is the point if I can only get 45 seconds into a discussion on our deficits with respect to GDP before I'm called a racist? Seems a little pointless.
So go watch Glen Beck, get outraged, and learn nothing about conservatism in the process. He's great entertainment.
Because I can hire an Eastern European, Indian, Oriental or Asian worker with a better work ethic with a living cost less than a quarter the fee I'd pay to an American and I don't even need to worry about employment contracts or benefits or anything.
Where do you find these super offshore developers? I've had terrible luck with offshore developers, but I'd like to improve my luck for the reasons you state.:)
Two things: 1. Any time I see someone write that they know "C/C++", my moron detector goes berserk. Beyond the most basic syntax, C and C++ are nothing alike. Sorry, but that's just a pet peeve of mine.
2. I find C++ programmers need a bit of retraining when they hop over to Java. First of all, a lot of Java programming is now framework-based. It's great that you know the basic language, but how are you Spring or JEE skills? Secondly, I find that C++ programmers write way too much code when they should be using libraries. I can't tell you how many times I've said, "Congratulations. You just spent 1 week implementing a buggy Xerces," or "Congratulations! You just implemented a broken commons-codec."
That being said, for a Java project, I'd take a C++ programmer with 10 years' experience over a Java developer with 2 years' experience any day of the week.
Knowing the Turing model is very different from knowing the effective idioms of a language.
Never mind knowing what is provided by the JDK or high quality, Apache-licenses libraries. I can't tell you how many broken, home-grown XML parsers, date math implementations, collections, sorting algorithms, string manipulators, HTML/Unicode/XML/etc. escaping routines, etc., I've seen from inexperienced Java developers. If you're implementing these yourself, you are introducing bugs into the system instead of using battle-tested libraries, so it's a big problem.
I also know some guys that grew up on C, and now code C++ like it's some horrible bastard-child of C and Java*.
This reminds me of a colossal pet peeve of mine when I'm reading a resume. If you write that you are skilled in "C/C++", then you had better be prepared to discuss with me, for solid 10 minutes, what the difference between C and C++ is. And I'm not just talking about OO, either. The C++ spec is huge! If you're not ready to discuss everything from stream I/O to exceptions to templates to namespaces to whatever else pops up in my obnoxious, little brain, then separate C and C++, because they share almost nothing except for basic syntax style.
Slashdot Mirror
she's not a hottie if she's close to his age.
It's always instructive to hear the views of the younger generation on sexual matters. And by "younger" I mean "twelve or under".
I dunno. When I was 25, I wouldn't have considered a 40 year old woman to be a "hottie". Obviously things change as you get older.
The only thing expensive about having kids is day care / preschool, which is pricey. But if one parent doesn't work, then they can take care of the kids. If both parents work, then it's a two-income household, and most should be able to bear that cost. Single parents are truly screwed here.
I'm a little concerned that you can look at the quoted text and conclude that kids are not expensive. Are you ignoring the opportunity cost of having one parent stop working? That's lost income as well as loss of career path/experience. Not a trivial sacrifice at all.
Also, for what it's worth, kids don't magically become cheap/free once they start public school. You've got activities, summer camp, before/after school care if necessary, etc. Travel all of a sudden cost a ton more with extra tickets and hotel room. And your grocery budget is going to increase substantially once your kids are teenagers.
So I would still argue that kids can be pretty expensive.
Basically, BG&E and Pepco suck. Move to Virginia if you don't want to live off of generator power for 15+ days/year.
It's worth pointing out that you don't qualify for EI in Canada if you are actually fired or leave a job willingly.
The situation is the same in the US. Resignations and terminations for cause are not covered by unemployment.
Luckily (depending on your point of view) nobody gets fired, they get laid off.
In the US, it really depends on the firm.
Here, companies get the unemployment insurance premiums raised when claims are paid, so there is a direct impact to the employer for doing layoffs. Larger employers don't really care about the premium hit because their internal process for terminating someone for cause is more expensive than just paying the increased premium. You have to waste the manager's time and HR's time on a performance improvement plan. You have to pay the employee's salary/benefits/taxes during that time, when you'd rather just ax them. And you have to waste time fighting the unemployment office when they try to characterize it as a layoff, anyway. That's way more than the premium increase.
Smaller firms are much more likely to terminate for cause and respond if the former employee files a wrongful claim for unemployment. This is mostly because it's more personal. The owner is going to be responding to the unemployment office, and the owner is going to be the one who is pissed off at the former employee, so he/she is definitely not going to let that person get unemployment willingly.
So I guess we have a mix here.
This is the interesting part, is the volatility necessarily short-term? Given that the market consists or 'true' investors and speculators/HFTs at any given time, and that they interact, couldn't the effects be longer-term?
Personally, I see no problem with volatility for the retail buy-and-hold investor. Not short term volatility, and not long term volatility.
The buy-and-hold investor isn't concerned with what the stock/ETF/mutual fund/whatever will be worth tomorrow, next week, or even next year. Personally, I think a good strategy for that type of investor (i.e. me, and probably you, as well) is to buy low-fee, broad, diversified ETFs monthly and automatically, dollar-cost averaging along the way. Using this simple technique, all of that volatility is irrelevant. In 10 years, I'm not going to care about all of the ups and downs that happened between when I bought and when I sold. And even when I sell, I'm not going to care if the ETF is bumping around a bit, because I bought it 10 years ago.
In the case of individual stocks, volatility and especially correlation can be his friend. After all, if he has evaluated a company and likes its financials, management, and potential business opportunities, he's going to want to buy when the market has punished the stock for no reason other than some European central banker raised an eyebrow during a speech and sent the whole market into a tizzy. Personally, I do not invest in individual stocks because I find it to be labor-intensive with respect to expected returns (I can make much more money spending my time growing my business than in stock picking), and it is very risky (I can try to evaluate a company, and I'm halfway decent at it, given my background in economics and as a business owner, but it's hard to know for sure, and the penalty for being wrong can be a 75-100% loss, easy).
So, days later, my opinion is that volatility is not a problem for retail investors, especially when you factor in the benefit of added liquidity. As a retail investor myself, I am not bothered by it.
I learned J2EE along the way. It includes some of the worst APIs I've had the displeasure of using.
No doubt. J2EE's byzantine API and reams of boilerplate code (which begot even more reams of generated code) and really, really stupid architecture decisions ensured that nobody would ever implement a full-stack J2EE system. I mean, just take Entity EJBs, for example. The persistent objects were not serializable, so you couldn't use them outside of the service layer. You had to map the entire object graph to and from serializable value objects. That decision alone pretty much spawned Hibernate. And the reams of boiletplate code spawned the Spring framework.
Everything has changed since the J2EE days. Now, Java EE has learned from the community's experience and the framework is now much more usable. JPA is pretty nice, and the annotations support did so much to reduce all of the boilerplate code/configuration. Java and its associated frameworks are getting away from the "write a ton of useless code" model. The success of Ruby on Rails I think was a big wakeup call in that regard.
You can do the responsible thing and sleep in a non operational seat with your keys more than an arms length away and not in the ignition. That demonstrates that you had no intent of operating your car.
This is Minnesota we're talking about. I hear it's cold there, and it might be nice to have the heat on.
Also it helps if you don't have three other prior convictions for DWI.
If you have 3 priors, you probably don't have a license anymore, anyway. And if you do, then you shouldn't. But that's a separate issue.
Well, sleeping in your car drunk is less likely to get you or someone else killed. So that's an incentive.
An incentive, yes. But not the type of incentive that drunk people tend to worry much about.
Which penalty are we talking about, the one where you pay a fine or the one where you end up killed or maimed?
The one that you're actually considering when you're wasted.
if you're drunk and in your car and get caught i have no sympathy for you.
It's attitudes like this that cause people to drive drunk.
If someone's drunk and wants to do the responsible thing (i.e. sleep it off and not drive until sober), there is no incentive to do that because the penalty for waiting until sober is the same as the penalty for driving drunk. So might as well drive drunk and roll the dice.
Does that makes sense? Fuck no. It makes no sense whatsoever for a stock or a commodity to be traded in nanosecond timeframes. It's asinine. There is no possible way for this to make any sense whatsoever.
You sound very convinced that trades being made rapidly is a bad thing. Why? What difference does it make if a trade is executed in nanoseconds, milliseconds, or seconds?
So, the question is, how fast do trades have to be?
How slow do trades have to be? What would we gain by that?
Here's a thing to think about though: the markets close every day for hours, and the economy doesn't suddenly collapse due to this suspension of "liquidity". Hence, the logical conclusion is that trades could be performed as infrequently as once an hour, and nothing would really change.
Not to blow your mind or anything, but have you heard of after-hours trading? You'd love it because there isn't much liquidity, but most investors avoid it like the plague because.. well.. there's little liquidity, and securities are priced very inefficiently. The after-hours markets are rife with manipulation. Trading in thinly-traded markets is not for the weak-stomached.
Personally, I don't see the point of after-hours trading, but I'm not going to argue for its elimination. Clearly someone has a use for it, so more power to them. Wake me in 15 years when I'm ready to start selling my stock.
Out of curiosity, how would someone in practical real life terms use this millisecond liquidity, as opposed to say, being limited to five seconds or such.
Since you are the one who is arguing for adding 5 seconds of artificial delays into the system, perhaps the onus should be on you to prove that this artificial inefficiency is somehow useful.
And let's not whine about market crashes, which anyway happened long before automated trading.
Also, do we really want lower transaction costs? They might shave pennies or even dollars off a stock market trade, but if the point of the stock market is investment in a company (rather that shifting wealth around) wouldn't we want incentive to stay vested in a company?
Stock market transactions used to be enormously expensive. To illustrate my point, let's ponder "then vs. now" what it would cost you to buy 100 shares of XYZ for $25. And by the way, back then, you had to buy/sell in multiples of 100 shares because most brokers wouldn't let you trade odd lots, and those that did charged a fee for it.
Then, you paid $50 in commission and had a bid/ask spread of $0.25. So that $2500 purchase would cost you $50 in commission and $12.50 in the bid/ask spread (I'm allocating half to the purchase and half to the sale), or $62.50, which is 2.5% of the value of what you bought. Add another 2.5% for when you sell, and that's a 5% loss just for investing at all.
Now, you pay $7 or 8 bucks a trade with penny spreads, on heavily-traded securities. 0.36% on each buy/sell.
I don't care if you're holding for 10 years or 10 seconds. Nobody wants to pay his broker and extra 4.28%
Again, I'm open to being proven otherwise, it's just I don't see what value they add. They don't hold onto the stock long enough for the real investors to use the capital they put into the market. They just seem to drive up the cost for real investors....
Could you more carefully explain what you mean about "holding onto the stock long enough for real investors to use the capital they put into the market"? That isn't making sense to me, but anyway, I think I've just shown that cost is lower now for real investors.
What HFTs do add, in addition to liquidity, is volatility. But it's not clear to me why "real investors" should care about short-term volatility. If you or I buy some stock and hold it for 15 years, neither of us is going to care that on 5/10/2019 (or any other day), trading happened to be really volatile.
Cuban was complaining about the flash crash, which granted, is not something that you want to have happen. But again, did you care about the flash crash? I didn't. I didn't do any trading that day. Or the day before. Or the day after. Or probably any day within a few months of the flash crash. Did my portfolio's value go down that day? Sure. And then it went back up again. Who cares?
But I'll definitely take my low transaction costs, please!
Thanks for the advice. I'd never really thought of using github so extensively, but it makes sense.
Again, that can get you sued, since it's obviously a ploy to trash a former employee's reputation.
Anything can get you sued. Do you have any examples of damages being awarded for saying that a former employee is ineligible for rehire? Because that's not subjective. They either are, or they are not, and it's nothing that the former employee can really quibble with.
Finally, calling a previous employer is stupid anyway. Why do you think the employee is leaving the former employer? If it was such a great place to work, then obviously he'd still be working there. He left because there was some sort of disagreement, and employers almost always hate it when an employee leaves them (even if it's because their pay sucks). What do you think you're going to hear when you call them up? A glowing review?
I've heard all manner of things calling former employers and former landlords.
But to answer your question, I'm not an idiot. I don't call current employer (unless applicant tells me to) because they normally don't know that the employee is looking. The employer before that generally has no ax to grind, and anyway, if the applicant has more than 2 brain cells and left that employer under bad terms, he or she is going to tell me what happened once it's clear that I'm going to call.
I don't expect a mistake-free past. Lord knows I'd fail that test. But I do expect people to own up to their mistakes and learn from them.
Interesting, I guess that explains why a US friend of mine suggested I remove the references section from my resume. It was quite shocking to me - round here, nobody would think of hiring you without a few good references.
It used to be customary to put "References available upon request" on resumes in the US. The latest advice is not to include that, since it's assumed that references will be available upon request. It just wastes space.
Employers definitely still call references in the US.
Such a contract would never be enforceable in America; it's called "right to work". In most states, the employer can fire you at any time without cause (as long as it isn't discriminatory; i.e. they find out you're gay or had a kid or whatever), and similarly, you can quit your job at any time without cause.
Right to work means you don't have to join a union as a condition of employment. And being gay is not a protected class is most jurisdictions.
So what's happened now is that most companies have a policy of NEVER discussing old employees with any new employers, to avoid any problems; they will only do the minimum required by law: they'll verify your dates of employment, and that's it.
Which law compels employers to discuss any information about a former employee? I'm not aware of any.
I've called references and been called many times. For one thing, you'd be surprised at how many people will give the unvarnished truth about a problem former employee. But anyway, the issue of "can't give a negative reference without liability exposure" is easily circumvented. Most references (myself included) will happily answer dates of service, job title, and "eligible for rehire?". That way, there's nothing subjective about it. Either they're eligible, or they're not. No need to disclose why, and I recommend that you decline, if asked.
What happened to companies hiring a competent worker and training them for the specifics of the job?
Companies aren't used to having to do that, because they haven't had to for a long time. They want a proven track record.
Not defending it. Just telling you what I see.
Impressive that you'd be able to get a daycare slot on such short notice. Normally they have waiting lists in my area.
(Given my track record, I appear to be an insufferable ass, so next time I'm out the door I'll start my own business. )
Highly recommend. If anything, you'll stop getting fired!
If I hadn't had EI, I'd likely have lost my house and wife.
Why would you lose your wife? Aren't you on the same team?
Sometimes unemployment benefits, both the size and duration, are a better option than a good job at a good wage.
Have you ever been on unemployment? I can't see how it would ever be better than a good job at a good wage. A crappy job at a crappy wage? Sure. But not a good job.
It's the same argument as with the muslims: if you don't want the extreme element of your organization to represent you, you should try being a little more vocal in your opposition when they spew their shit.
We try, but it's always the crackpots who command the attention. The Becks and the Limbaughs and the Palins of the world are the ones who sell the ad slots, so they are the ones you see on TV. Pity.
Also, I have to admit that explaining conservative positions to liberals gets a little old. What is the point if I can only get 45 seconds into a discussion on our deficits with respect to GDP before I'm called a racist? Seems a little pointless.
So go watch Glen Beck, get outraged, and learn nothing about conservatism in the process. He's great entertainment.
Because I can hire an Eastern European, Indian, Oriental or Asian worker with a better work ethic with a living cost less than a quarter the fee I'd pay to an American and I don't even need to worry about employment contracts or benefits or anything.
Where do you find these super offshore developers? I've had terrible luck with offshore developers, but I'd like to improve my luck for the reasons you state. :)
Two things:
1. Any time I see someone write that they know "C/C++", my moron detector goes berserk. Beyond the most basic syntax, C and C++ are nothing alike. Sorry, but that's just a pet peeve of mine.
2. I find C++ programmers need a bit of retraining when they hop over to Java. First of all, a lot of Java programming is now framework-based. It's great that you know the basic language, but how are you Spring or JEE skills? Secondly, I find that C++ programmers write way too much code when they should be using libraries. I can't tell you how many times I've said, "Congratulations. You just spent 1 week implementing a buggy Xerces," or "Congratulations! You just implemented a broken commons-codec."
That being said, for a Java project, I'd take a C++ programmer with 10 years' experience over a Java developer with 2 years' experience any day of the week.
Knowing the Turing model is very different from knowing the effective idioms of a language.
Never mind knowing what is provided by the JDK or high quality, Apache-licenses libraries. I can't tell you how many broken, home-grown XML parsers, date math implementations, collections, sorting algorithms, string manipulators, HTML/Unicode/XML/etc. escaping routines, etc., I've seen from inexperienced Java developers. If you're implementing these yourself, you are introducing bugs into the system instead of using battle-tested libraries, so it's a big problem.
I also know some guys that grew up on C, and now code C++ like it's some horrible bastard-child of C and Java*.
This reminds me of a colossal pet peeve of mine when I'm reading a resume. If you write that you are skilled in "C/C++", then you had better be prepared to discuss with me, for solid 10 minutes, what the difference between C and C++ is. And I'm not just talking about OO, either. The C++ spec is huge! If you're not ready to discuss everything from stream I/O to exceptions to templates to namespaces to whatever else pops up in my obnoxious, little brain, then separate C and C++, because they share almost nothing except for basic syntax style.