Please tell me when it was ever easy. Rumors of the job market being easy in the past are vastly overstated. Before the Internet, before entry to IT was as easy as it later became, I graduated high school as valedictorian and took the highest paying job I could find based on my skills: factory labor in a box factory. I got married a year after high school, we had a son, and THEN I started junior college. Before I got my associate degree in IT 3.5 years later, we had two more children. I worked the factory job for 5.5 years. When laid off, I worked in convenience stores, chem labs, other factories, whatever I could find (and finding short-term work was not easy--sometimes spent weeks finding a job, only to be called back to the factory.) In my last semester, I worked an unpaid internship in a bank IT department while still working the factory job at night. The bank hired me. I have worked on the same software, following it from owner to owner, ever since. I have done extremely well. But I was in no way prosperous until I hit my mid-30's. We lived in apartments for years, then a mobile home, and finally a house when I was 31. So from age 19 through about 35, you might say it was a struggle. It's not that I don't sympathize with 20-somethings who think they have it rough, but I would like to tell you that for most people, getting along is NOT easy and NOT guaranteed. This whole business of getting the right degree and then networking your way to fun and glory--if you can pull it off, cool. If not, perhaps you ought to start grinding at whatever you can, save up some money, and keep grinding for the chance you want. Oh, and get off my lawn (kidding--I know I sound like that guy.) Good luck, but more than that I wish you the benefits of every second of your own efforts--eventually.
Makes me think about programming IN a foreign language. One time we had to fix some code a Turkish client had added to our system. The spec and the code were in Turkish (imagine Turkish COBOL if you will). We somehow got it done by trial and error (Is THIS what you want? No? How about THIS?) I have no idea whether this means anything, but we came away saying "Berklat bokari" to each other at random moments on future assignments. Those words or something like them kept appearing in the Turkish code.
The BEST part was that some years later, the cops busted a coke ring that was operating out of the cafeteria. Lots of cafeteria workers and IT folks went down. Not me--I was at my desk with Campbell's Soup every day. I realized my post made me sound a pathetic loner. I actually made some friends there who I still lunch with today, though they are of course pushing retirement age now. Business IT was very different from now in the 1980's. At 24 I was by far the youngest on the mainframe team. I kept that distinction on into my early 30's at different employers, before "youngsters" in their late 20's started showing up. The mainframe IT guys/girls (at least in bank IT departments) of the 1980's tended to be older than 30, very much relics of the 60's and 70's. This means I also witnessed the Y2K bug being crafted. I was zapped quite a few times for carelessly allocating 8 bytes for date fields. "You're wasting 2 bytes carrying the century." My bad! I worked on the same system (for a different company) 20 years later and made good money helping upgrade all the dates. Things changed over the years, but in my experience, I have never been at a place that has any kind of food culture aside from ad hoc lunch groups that form outside the office. Certainly never any company-funded food.
How nice. On my first day 27 years ago as a programmer, I followed the team to the bank op center cafeteria at lunch time. I loaded up my tray and went to join them at the long table. As I sat down in the only empty seat, someone said, "That's Linda's place." I looked around and saw no Linda, but they were all staring at me with hostility. I dumped my tray and went back to my desk. Some years later during a review, my boss nailed me for not being more sociable with my colleagues. I told him I did not want to upset Linda.
You mean like the Opti Grab?
We learned a lot about blindness from having guardianship of our blind teenage nephew for a year. True, the ear piece would be the big benefit for him (though one eye was very slightly sensitive to light). Others at his school had varying degrees of low vision and might at least benefit from bright flashes of light. But the big gain would be something that describes his environment out loud. Blind people do still aim their faces toward things. And it's much better than a similar capability in a handheld device such as the iPhone or iPod Touch, because for the blind, orienting a handheld device correctly can be a major problem. We turned on the accessibility features for our nephew's iPod, but the thing would switch from landscape to portrait as he turned his hand slightly. Head-mounted is the way to go. And for the sighted, it will be great for games, as I found out from the prototype glasses I got: http://youtu.be/lQGpOibUsyo
I was being tag-team interviewed for a programming job. The first guy asked me what I disliked about my current workplace. I said, "Nothing," because money was my only reason for leaving. He didn't believe I couldn't find one negative thing to say, and made bold marks (probably a big "X") on a paper. In the next interview, a lady manager asked me the same question. Not wanting to make the same mistake twice, I said, "Office politics," and sat back smiling, ready for the next question. She frowned and said, "Define office politics." I said, "Umm..habbadababbadah...gah..er," until she decided to move on to another question. I got the job!
You do know this is the final season of House? Would you rather see them continue to turn Chase into a Mini Me version of House (getting scruffy, painful injury, ignoring protocol) or witness a battle for relevance against a robot with smarts like the Watson computer? I'll take the robot battle.
I think "House" should end with him and his team being replaced by a computer. It will need to be a robot (like the one on Lost in Space, ideally), not a web page, but symcat has the right idea. It would also be cool if the robot was a master game-player, finally putting House in his place.
That reminds me of a similar experience I had with a bag of Portuguese Men of War I collected and then set free. We must never hoard Nature, no matter who gets stung.
The misery can be avoided. I have my girl print off only the most relevant "wall postings" along with my morning emails. I review these over my after-breakfast coffee or sometimes (God willing) over a mid-morning BM. Either way, I only allocate 15-17 minutes per day to "the web" and the rest to managing my department.
I'm confused. I'm trying to get rich writing jokes, and you tell me to quit being a joker and just get it done. But "it" is being a joker. Seb, are you going meta on me? Am I supposed to consider my professional joking to be something else, in the same way bank IT workers in the 80's were told to think of themselves as bankers, not programmers? OK, man, BAM I'm not a joker. Welp, back to work!
That's a great idea. Back in the 90's, hoping to cut down on my contact with work during vacation, I told people I would be "rafting in Utah." I had no idea that Utah was such a popular rafting destination--living as I did in Atlanta, it sounded just remote enough to make people think I was out of reach, even though I was in fact at home the whole time. It worked to eliminate attempts to contact me, but for the 20 years since then I have had to maintain the fiction that a) I am a white-water rafting enthusiast (I am not); and b) that I went to Utah in 1991 (I DID go there in 2003 on business, but no rafts were involved). In retrospect, just letting the phone ring or routing my email to the bit-bucket would have been a lot better.
I wonder: If he's sleepy and you don't provide a couple of Pepsi's, does he just nod off in mid-speech? "Let me remind you, it's not just Linux, it's Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..."
My dad learned IBM assembler and COBOL from the IRS in 1968. When I, at age 10 in 1970, asked him what he did at his job, he handed me an IBM Principles of Operation (POOP) manual, an IBM green card, and a stack of punched cards with a program encoded thereupon. "Mostly Lost" is OK for today's yute, but I'm sure glad the magical mystery fairy tale school of learning was not in operation when I cut my programming teeth.
In his defense, I had made a somewhat obnoxiously worded point about not wanting special treatment because of my handicap. I was in no danger. Those woods are rife with people making job offers and someone was bound to come along sooner or later.
I got one of those email invites, to work on my specialty (accessibility features). It was a bit of a fiasco as my chair got stuck in some mud on the trail. MZ kept walking and talking while my wheels spun and dug me ever deeper into the slime. Thank God some other guys came along. I think it was a Honda service manager courting a new mechanic, because they both had tools and the older guy had a "Honda" patch on his shirt. Anyway, I lived, but I didn't get the FB job.
I've been in very similar situations, except I did not turn my life over to the ones I was helping. If you have shown someone how to organize their money (a dubious enterprise with people in their 70's who have never done so), and have helped them access social services, then please feel free to leave and not feel guilt. The family members I helped in this way could go along for months with no apparent crises; as soon as I arrived to help them with some specific effort, I was presented with an avalanche of emergencies: illnesses, broken appliances, unpaid bills, conflict with neighbors, etc. After spending a week getting those issues resolved, I was hit up for a return visit to handle the original purpose of my visit. Each visit was a new list of crises. When the crisis culminated in the death of our uncle, we "airlifted" our handicapped nephew out of there and into our home and left the rest of the family to fend as best they could. Guess what? Without us there to help, they managed to get on disability and other forms of welfare and are doing OK. If you have the time, means and inclination to deal with people like that, do it; if not, no one outside of the family will blame you for taking care of yourself.
Not so odd: we're targeting the Indian market. We lost our PM to an arranged marriage (or rather to his new in-laws' family business) and we needed an Indian, fast. They are in short supply in our part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, so we went straight to the source. All we know about India is there are a lot of potential customers; we know we need a local to navigate the culture for us.
We outsourced our PM function some years ago. After a couple of years working remotely with an excellent PM in Mumbai, we noticed that the spelling and grammar in his emails had changed radically. We asked through discrete channels whether our guy had had a stroke or something that impacted his writing. It turned out Habarjahn had actually died and been replaced, but they tried to sneak the new guy in on us without letting us know. Funny how you can form attachments with a co-worker you never even saw or spoke with. Now, though, we're equally fond of Narendra (assuming it's still him.)
I usually need to pinch a mega loaf right around lunchtime. I would love to do it earlier, but getting ready and commuting all use up too much time in the morning. Call me anti-social, but I treasure the "me time" that allows me to get it done w/o an unexplained long absence from my desk. Likewise, if I were expected to show up at the communal lunch table, I'm sure I would always be late and be met with snide remarks such as "everything come out all right?" and "out with the old in with the new, eh?" and other such witticisms. No, give me my very special session in the restroom followed by some time with my Kindle and a sack lunch in a quiet grotto, and I'm OK with the forced togetherness of the rest of the workday.