Does it make sense that an app. with the sole purpose of sharing user-submitted videos would somehow be devoid of any questionable/suggestive content? Isn't it kinda Apple's fault for insisting that apps conform to their age guidelines, when those apps involve user-submitted videos? I mean...who lets their 12- to 17-year-old use an app like Vine? Do they honestly believe nothing bad might come of that?
My biggest concern is regarding the internal software and dosimetry controls. Could there be a fault condition that would result in unintended levels of ionizing radiation? It wouldn't be the first such accident..
I think most recent college graduates have bigger issues than worrying about their 'self-branding'. It takes time, and, usually some experience, to build an identity. Sometimes you just have to 'wing-it' and see where that takes you. I'd bet that most employers wouldn't expect a kid fresh out of college to know his/her 'true calling'.
Here are some things I wish someone would've shared with me...
- If you want to thrive in the professional world, get a fucking haircut and at least look the part.
- If you think that you can send out a bunch of resumes and be flooded with calls about job offers, you are wrong.
- Most of the phrases you've heard in your youth are true. Ex. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease". See the above point. If you get a job (or a check) just by sending a resume (or invoice), consider it an anomaly, and yourself lucky.
- In life, everyone is only concerned about their own well-being. You've got to learn to highlight 'what's in it for them'. See the above point.
- You're on your own, so make your time and actions count!
> If you get a check just by sending a invoice, consider it an anomaly, and yourself lucky.
So very, very true.
"Oh you want to get paid for this consulting project huh? Well we can't just wire the money to you, no, please fill out this form so we can put you in our SAP system. Oh, you haven't been paid? well well, you're not in our system.
We've finally put you our system, here's a record of our payment to you.
no money in my bank account
argh!"
Direct experience with my country's 3rd largest bank. Once outside regular salaried work, liquidity is more of an issue than solvency. You might have billed 5 months of rent, but your real estate agent doesn't accept unpaid invoices as legal tender....
I disagree about your second point. I'm a CS Major at a top 10 program, with a pretty good GPA (~3.7). This is a throwaway account btw.
During this fall recruiting season, I sent out my resumes to all the top companies, and was offered interviews at every single one. With the exception of two companies, I received offers from everywhere I interviewed, including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. I think the market is so hot right now that you CAN get showered with job offers just by sending out a lot of resumes.
I suppose that's sometimes true. However, some people in certain situations might receive unsolicited job offers, without ever even creating a resume or submitting an application, right?
The point I was trying to make is that, I'd encourage young people to follow-up after sending out a resume. It will help you gain 'chops' for future calling/prospecting that may be required. Also, it's professional to follow-up with a phone call after sending an email to someone you've never met or spoken to before.
I get a lot of unsolicited resumes sent my way. Hardly anyone ever calls to follow-up. My thought is, I'm a busy person, and if the person really truly wants to work with me, they won't give up. I want to see persistence.
I bet that Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft all have very well-thought-out recruiting programs. I'd imagine that young college grad's could be hired for a lower salary than older, more seasoned software engineers. Those large companies are probably more flexible with young recruits. Everything in life is a trade-off. Why would those companies "shower" kids fresh out of college with job offers? I'd venture to guess that they are interested in hiring them because it's cheaper than hiring someone else with more experience. Or maybe that's how it is in the software job market. But as I see so many Americans out of work, expecting someone to 'create jobs' for them, I think it's important to highlight what it takes to get a job that you want. I'd consider your example of software engineers being "showered with job offers" as an exception to the rule. Most people have to actively pursue what they want in life. Plus, in 25 years you don't want to be one of those people on TV begging the government to 'create jobs' for you! So my advice is to learn how to get what you want by asking.
It is a common practice to hire anyone promising and see how it works out. It is a fools errand to think that you understand what a person will deliver from a job interview process. I recently put an ad on craigslist for a personal assistant for me. I was looking for a college student, times were flexible, and my office is within one mile of University of Arizona and Pima College - 60,000 students.
The ad asked for a cover letter, resume, and to come in person to the office for a typing test. I have a chronic condition that prevents me from typing much more than an hour a day. Simple, right? I received over a hundred responses of mostly low quality, people blindly firing in poorly written resumes or worse (one simply stated "I need a job and will work for money") and 5 people that actually followed instructions. I hired all five of them. One didn't like the job and left on good terms, another was great but ended up needing to work on school more, two were fired for being incompetent and the remainder is left but I promoted her and made her full time.
I know that this is not a typical hacker job, merely a personal assistant job. The point is that even in a small 10 person non-tech company like mine you can take a risk of over-hiring to try and find the good ones, the people that fit and like your business culture. Microsoft, Google, Apple et al can certainly afford to hire every reasonably competent programmer they can find that seems to fit their hiring profile. Time will tell if their potential gets realized at BigCorp. Just remember that this is a learning experience for both sides of the table.
Count yourself lucky. I graduated in 2011 and only got 2 offers from BigCo's like that, and 3 grad-school admissions out of 7 applications. Ended up being much easier to get offers from start-ups, actually.
Analogue meters have uses that you don't get from digital readouts. Watching a signal slowly fluctuating on an analogue meter is "nicer" than seeing some numbers go up and down.
Great comment. Wow steam engines are great, and at small scale they are even better. Dual action, those centrifugal governors, and the smell of that lubricant oil mixed with hot water. I'd never before considered messing about with small steam engines to be hacking... That used to waste many an afternoon. Don't fuse the safety valve though, that's a bad way to get power and eye brow re-growth takes ages and annoys one's mother.
It's easy to blame the person --- the offender. But when you think about the way society works, often times the most effective solutions to risk are a combination of social campaigns to educate the masses, as well as physical controls or barriers to prevent bad things from happening.
For example: think about speed bumps. Sure, we could just blame any drivers who crash into pedestrians in parking lots, but by adding speed bumps, we are reinforcing what people already know --- that speeding through parking lots can be dangerous.
Same thing with seatbelts --- you know that annoying chime that won't stop until you've buckled your seatbelt? Why do we need that? Why not simply blame any drivers who crash? Because it reminds people to do what they already know they should be doing. It reinforces safe behavior. It helps to reduce a burden on society --- the negative effects of fatal car accidents.
So I have a hard time whenever I hear someone say 'the problem isn't guns, it's the people who use them', because I think that's only part of the solution. Should people be allowed to purchase firearms "same-day" at gun shows? Should people be allowed to purchase and own as many guns and as much ammo. as they please? Is there something wrong with at least discussing possible reforms to make it more difficult for people to buy guns?
Modern society seems to be good at creating situations where people feel powerless or like lashing out. The offender obviously makes an awful choice, but maybe we should think about how to make things so that society isn't so brutal?
I say that gun control is the "easy" answer because it is a response to a specific event. That doesn't mean that I think that gun control is "bad". I'm just saying that the underlying issue that leads people to do awful things has other negative (but not as horrific) effects too.
As an unrelated illustration, the 14 year old inner city kid walking around with a gun or knife feels miserable and powerless. The weapon makes him feel empowered, but in a negative way -- if he grows up that way, that's going to leave him vulnerable to substance abuse and that mindset will be passed on to his kids and his social circle too.
On February 2, warning lights on a radiation warning system failed due to
previous software modifications to the fail-safe system. It was discovered
that no records of the revisions to the software were ever required or
maintained, so the direct cause of the malfunction was unclear.
My impression is that you end up with bad code in critical systems due to the exact same forces as anywhere else.
Difference is, rather than ramping up the quality of the development / testing with the seriousness of the application, people tend to ramp up the requirement hair-splitting, ass-covering and accountability obfuscating.
Fighting this requires a rare, uncompromising attitude that often isn't conducive to remaining employed.
In addition to that, there are hardware companies that have always seen software as necessary but uninteresting, thus trying to cut costs on it as much as possible, and not knowing how to set up an environment conductive to good software development (like having non-programmer physicists code in C, or still being stuck using 80's source control tools).
(A classic case study -- a radiation therapy machine that was badly programmed, resulting in several accidents where patients were given massive overdoses of radiation).
This is one of the reasons I opt-out of airport scans. The less I stand in-front of something emitting radiation the less chance there is for a software error to cause me to get a higher dosage than was intended.
"A study by the DOE Plutonium Vulnerability Working Group concluded that the storage containers used to store pits do not provide an effective containment barrier, and that the effects of aging on the pits, such as corrosion and cracking, are unknown."
Lovely. Glad to see they are taking the necessary precautions to protect the 12k+ pits of plutonium at the Pantex site
Lesson to all: If the word Plutonium appears anywhere in a statement of work that is usually sign you need to adhere to more stringent coding standards.
$50 per user per year (or $5/user/month) is a lot of money when you're just starting a business, and especially if you weren't planning on having to spend that money. Just in time for Christmas...
Now I have to contact all of the people I've sent proposals to, telling them that the "free email service through Google Apps" I promised them is no longer free. Google should have told us Apps Resellers, or, at the least, they should give us an opportunity to create a few more free Apps accounts for clients we've been pitching their product to. Not every business starts out with a need for >10 users. Google has been telling their Apps Resellers to get people 'hooked' on the free version of Apps, then migrate them to the paid offering. Now what?
Sorry. If your business is built on marking up and reselling free things, I can't feel sorry for you. That was one of those reflex apologies. Not a real apology.
If your clients have waited until 2 weeks before Christmas to sign, then they are actually the bad guys and they deserve to pay more. When exactly are you supposed to do your gift shopping?
Heavens forbid that someone try to make a living providing cost-efficient technical solutions like a website and email to non-tech-saavy small businesses!
Cry me a river! Cost-efficient != free electricity and high-availability networking. I'm sure it was great while it lasted. Google have not actively shut anybody down.
If you want efficiency, buy low power machines and cobble together what services you need with free software. You can have RoundCube up and running in a matter of a few hours. I don't know any other webmail providers that provide SMTP, POP3, and IMAP for free. Those are all value-adds.
How much do you think that's worth? Would you include free support and maintenance if they were your machines and the setup charge did not fully pay for them? Do you think that it would be sustainable to do that?
Have you heard that it takes money to make money? If these businesses wanted to grow past 25 employees, they had to be prepared to move to a paying plan anyway. Those of us who were grandfathered in have obviously dodged a bullet. I can tell you that I've run mail servers on small machines for groups of users ~=25 before, and it's not very hard, but today I have free hosted Google Apps and therefore I want no part in it anymore.
(For the record, I am running my own mail server, but I'm not currently accepting applications for new accounts. I will be sad when I want to grow past 25 users if it means I need to start paying $5/mo for each of them, because I never learned to scale on my own.)
