Because Sony decided to add a mandatory arbitration clause to get around the lawsuits resulting from the disclosure of 100,000,000+ names, addresses and credit cards.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2011/09/15/sony-adds-mandatory-a...
1,017 karma · joined December 13, 2008
Yes. And with adjuncts (folks brought in to teach one or two courses per semester), getting low scores on the ratings means you don't get your contract renewed for the following semester.
For tenure-tracked teachers, your ratings are included in the things that they look at for tenure review.
> and thus being able to be harsh when necessary without having to self-correlate his behaviour in fear of being financially punished
You can only do that after you're achieved tenure.
Here in Denver, there are a number of companies hiring through recruiters that try to say "this is a 3 month contract" but the job ends up lasting 2-3 weeks. So you are right, it is hard to get folks to agree to a 3 week "job" - you have to lie to them.
50 cent and $1 coins are not commonly used in the US due to decisions of the companies that made coin acceptors (the part of the vending machine that takes, counts and validates coins) back in the 1950s and 1960s. Basically, they did not want to hand out 45 cents of change from a 50 cent piece (nor 95 cents change from a dollar coin) so they deliberately chose not to support those coins. Consequently, they stopped being used by many in the public as they were "inconvenient." As those coins became less common, the companies that made cash register drawers chose not to make bins for coins that weren't in common use, so there became no easy way for businesses to take those coins.
The low usage of $2 notes is also reflected in cash register drawer designs - there is no place for those notes, so most cashiers toss them under the drawer along with checks and large ($50 & $100 notes), so the circulation of $2 is very low. I personally like to get stacks of them and spend them instead of carrying $20 notes around. Some places, like at the Renaissance Fair, hand them back as change to the next guy (there is no slot in the till for them) so the next guy gets something they've rarely seen and they get thrilled.
One of the security procedures is that you are not allowed to carry money into the facility at all. Basically, you empty your pockets at the locker room and if you have more than about $20 in cash, it has to be documented and held by the shift supervisor. All entrance and departure is through a sally port at regular times. If you're late for work, they're not letting you in. Randomly, people are stopped and searched.
Finally, they take a no-mercy stance when it comes to prosecution, as theft from a US Mint has draconian penalties (like 18 years in the pen for stealing $100). Any arrests and prosecutions are covered quite well to the other employees (probably to remind them to "don't do this"). One of the thefts involved someone with one of the larger music players (it might have been a CD player) who had hollowed out part of it to be able to stash dollar coins in them, taking out about $20/day.
A friend of a friend worked at one of the large megachurches in Colorado Springs. People working in the mailroom would be required to change into pocketless jumpsuits before their shift as many people mail cash to the ministry, and opening an envelope with thousands of dollars in cash was not rare. With casino-grade surveillance cameras and pocketless clothing, this made it difficult by design to pilfer cash. People worked in pairs (someone in front of you and watching you makes it hard to stuff cash down your sleeve) and the pairs were rotated (so you could not make deals with some partner).
> Now for the matter of drive. You observe that most great scientists have tremendous drive. I worked for ten years with John Tukey at Bell Labs. He had tremendous drive. One day about three or four years after I joined, I discovered that John Tukey was slightly younger than I was. John was a genius and I clearly was not. Well I went storming into Bode's office and said, ``How can anybody my age know as much as John Tukey does?'' He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, grinned slightly, and said, ``You would be surprised Hamming, how much you would know if you worked as hard as he did that many years.'' I simply slunk out of the office!
> What Bode was saying was this: ``Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.'' Given two people of approximately the same ability and one person who works ten percent more than the other, the latter will more than twice outproduce the former. The more you know, the more you learn; the more you learn, the more you can do; the more you can do, the more the opportunity - it is very much like compound interest. I don't want to give you a rate, but it is a very high rate. Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime. I took Bode's remark to heart; I spent a good deal more of my time for some years trying to work a bit harder and I found, in fact, I could get more work done. I don't like to say it in front of my wife, but I did sort of neglect her sometimes; I needed to study. You have to neglect things if you intend to get what you want done. There's no question about this.
2000 and 2001 were terrible years for developers. You'll hear them described as all sorts of terms, including "dotBomb." It took me 8 years to get my salary back to the same dollar amount I was making in 2000. And that 8 year period included 2 years I was out of work (23 months spread over 3 gaps).
There is a saying that goes "make hay while the sun shines." Aside from the obvious agricultural meaning, it also means that you should make as much as you can during the rich years, and put some aside for the lean years [3].
My estimation is that there are really 2 job pools. One for junior level skills and one for senior level skills. There is a large gap in salaries. When execs and politicians whine about a shortage of experienced workers [4], they're complaining that the senior pool is too expensive. However, all their options of making colleges produce more workers, or opening the visa flood gates will only serve to increase the quantity of folks in the junior pool. It takes time, training and effort to move yourself from the junior pool to the senior pool. But it will be up to you - no company will do it for you, and indeed, with the constant demand for workers who can "hit the ground running" that shows that companies want the benefit of the senior pool without contributing to the succession from the junior pool.
Notes:
1 - Companies who ask what you are making now will usually try to limit you to 10-15% raises with your new position. Part of this is a cultural dislike for people moving up too fast. Victorian literature was full of tales of people who tried to move to another "station in life" and were found out then sent back to the lower classes they came from. This is the sort of mentality you'll find during interviews.
2 - Confidence will get you in the door, but you have to get work done to keep your job.
3 - This is not limited to retirement savings. By age 28-30, you should have about 6 months income saved up for the times when you will be out of work. By 35, you should have more like 12 months saved up. That is your lifeboat and the only way you can survive the ups and downs of the industry. Developers over 40 who get laid off can find it takes 6-12 months to get a replacement job.
4 - Mostly they want protection from the free market, but usually what's happening is that they think they need senior level workers but are only willing to pay junior level wages. So they want some sort of bailout from the government.
Something is very wrong with our industry. Most of the time that articles come out like this, industry executives are trying to get more kids to go into programming in order to lower the cost of employees: they want protection from the free market.
The last company I worked for (for 5 years, and it was a Fortune 100 company) was complaining publicly that they were unable to find developers - yet people who quit over the past 2 years were never replaced, nor were we allowed to interview candidates.
1 - There are karma/score based systems in both sites that highly reward "first to post" interesting articles.
2 - There is no penalty here for bad initial posts, so there is no real penalty for not "posting news related to hackers."
3 - Both have a karma/score based system for rewarding interesting comments.
You will find similar situations on the stackoverflow sorts of sites, although one of the rewarding moves available at stackoverflow is unavailable here - which is to make a fast quick post and continue to edit it and add more details from other answers.
Any system with a score or badge as a sort of "reward" will get gamed. I'm sorry if you are offended by it, but that is the way things are.
http://www.amazon.com/Power-Nightmares-Various/dp/B001707D98
If your local library has a copy, I strongly recommend watching it.
One should remember that not long prior to the shutdown of the facility making fogbank, the Rocky Flats facility (which made plutonium bits for nuclear weapons) was the first nuclear facility raided by the FBI and EPA for environmental violations (among them was burning plu contaminated waste in open barrels and losing track of hundreds of pounds of plu).
One example of this that is frustrating and heartbreaking at the same time is a piece by Gladwell called "Million Dollar Murray"
I work part-time with the department of interior, and they've tried writing job specs like this, and the person they wanted to hire has never made it through OPM.
> It could be that when writing a RFQ that there is a similar method: one decides first what product/team you want, then write the RFQ to match that product/team.
This is done all the time in private industry as well. "Politics" isn't limited just to governments.
The lawsuits against Interior have to do with Indian tribes being cheated out of royalties going back, oh, a hundred years or more. One book where this subject was touched upon (and gives an idea of the size of the discrepancies) is Sinister Pig. http://www.amazon.com/Sinister-Pig-Tony-Hillerman/dp/0060194... Pretty much any tribe with oil, gas, coal, uranium or any other economically valuable mineral is involved in sueing Interior. This means that just about every tribe is sueing Interior.
Employee orientation with Interior includes some explanation of these suits as well as what needs to be preserved.
I could post a Great Wall of Text(tm)(r) explaining why she was a rotten CEO, and it wouldn't be anywhere near as polite as the linked article.
Finally, I have never met a person who worked at HP who actually liked what she did to the company. I'm sure there are some, but at the facility I worked at (in Colorado Springs), there were none that I met.