You're assuming that Paypal didn't purposely withhold any provided proof of scam, to avoid further action on this issue. That appears to be exactly what Paypal did.
Having very effectively used yield-like functionality in a few languages, I too am looking forward to it.
In Python it's allowed me to structure certain data-consuming and data-emitting functions in a way that makes both reading sense and storage-usage sense.
It's a bit like the pity I have on people that make phone calls for telemarketers. The position itself is a fiction, designed to maximize placement ("hard sell") at the expense of honesty. Yes, there are people stuck in those jobs. I have pity on the people stuck there. But the position itself is inherently corrupt.
The whole move of hiring away from people with some technical knowledge (enough to even _read_ resumes) towards impersonal, technically uneducated HR departments, out to tech recruiters who often are even worse at keyword searching than the HR departments, has been to the detriment of the job market.
I completely agree. The industry itself has become more and more corrupt over the years. However, I think it is a case of the acts of a few tarring everyone with the same brush. There are people within the industry who are genuinely well versed and technically minded, and benefit from this. That's what I aspire to be like for however long I'm in this job for. But it's an uphill struggle.
We're salespeople. No one grows up wanting to be a salesperson. I've got a degree in Classical Civilization. I have no idea why I've ended up as a salesperson. But I don't think that should make me a bad person just because I put as much effort as possible into my current job. I'm not looking to completely change the view of the industry, just to show more of a human side to it. Besides, I've built relationships with managers who I now consider friends, and I've made placements with people who have ended up absolutely loving their jobs. There are positives to it, and that's what keeps me going.
However, I think it is a case of the acts of a few tarring everyone with the same brush.
I honestly used to think the exact same thing however I've quickly come to realise that the opposite is true. There are infinitely more shitty recruiters than decent ones but that's not to mean the shitty approach works.
The very fact that you frequent HN is a big plus in your favour. HN was incredibly helpful and supportive of me during my quest to prove all recruiters aren't scum so hopefully if you stick with your job and continue to contribute here, they'll show you the same respect you show them.
I've read your blog and agree wholeheartedly with the points you've made about the industry. I think it's a case of being the underdog if you want to do the job properly. In an ideal world, I'd be recruiting for one of the clients I deal with. That'd be the perfect solution to the problems I have with the job right now. I'd be building my tech knowledge without (I assume) such aggressive targets and the constant barrage of failure (to put a bleak spin on it).
Alternatively, I'll just continue to learn to code until I get a job doing that with wherever I've made a placement. That's been a serious consideration of mine for a while now, but we're looking at another couple of years of working at it, and I don't think I've got it in me to stay in this job for that long!!
I doubt it is the case of the few -- it is much more likely to be the case of the vast, vast majority. If not, you would hear from the good ones far more often.
In every "job advice" article I've ever read, the employee is warned NEVER to accept an offer to stay at the same job, for ANY reason at all, because the employer will no longer see the employee as "loyal".
Seems funny to me that companies expect loyalty out of us, but provide nowhere to develop. I'd have been glad staying at my past two jobs if they'd continued challenging me. Instead, they started making poor use of my time (getting me to be a data entry monkey despite years of sysadmin and software engineering experience because I was the fastest typist they knew and was "around"). They paid too much for their use of that skill, and we both knew it, and I left, and I hear mumblings and incantations to the effect that they never wanted me to leave. Well, show it.
I don't know how prevalent it really is, but I was once labeled "disloyal" for looking around at other internal positions. Needless to say, I got out of that company (though it did take almost a year from that incident to do so).
I've just recently been thinking about "working" 20-30 hours a week, so I have time to work on some projects of my own. I find there are two main obstacles to reducing my paid "work" load.
1. I currently rely on contract work, and I find that I don't have contacts that want to employ a contractor for 20-30 hours a week, or even a set of contractors who want to employ for a combined 20-30 hours a week. Usually when people hire contractors, they want something done as soon as possible, without distractions.
To obtain my desired work hours per week, I will have to greatly extend my contacts list. Which I should do anyway, but it won't happen overnight.
2. Health insurance. I have mild schizophrenia which, untreated, makes it hard for me to reason logically. With the proper medication and care I remain gainfully employed as a dev/sysadmin/devops role. On top of that I have Tourette syndrome.
Insurance for anyone with these kinds of pre-existing conditions is expensive; laws changed such that very soon they won't be able to _deny_ it to me, but they can price it as high as they like. Despite having substantial savings, long periods of not having any income is out of the question for me. Therefore, either traditional corporate employment, or full-time contract work at a high enough wage to pay for high-quality insurance, are the way to go.
I don't mention these things in a "waaaa, waaaaa, I'm so helpless" way--far from it. I've attained more than the average person in my career, in terms of skills and pay.
Rather, I think people on this site forget sometimes that not everyone is suited to risk it all on a startup, and not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur, and not everyone has to be an A+++++ level developer to get by, and it's not a sin to seek some stability.
_This_. I'm frustrated already with having to attach my cellphone to an @gmail.com address (yes, you can have Google Apps for Domains addresses as secondaries, but you're not billed through it).
I don't know why the article considers the only two possible options as "Metro" and "Aero". I'd go for "Classic".
I still set my Windows boxes to that style immediately after install, along with separately turning off most other visual enhancements in the System control panel.
I'm not a complete luddite; I know that on a modern system Aero is not going to have a terrible effect on performance, and that UI elements can be customized, and that I like some of the Windows 7 enhancements to the taskbar and start menu. But the visual style of Aero is just extra visual distraction.
I can see the point of using GPU to accelerate the UI, but there should always be an option of minimal visual distraction.
Good news for you: With windows 8 DWM is a core system component which you can not even kill it from Task Manager or disable it with Services.msc. You can say "where is the good news?" here it is: Shake, snap, preview, peek and all other aero features are enabled for you even you GPU is not very capable for them. It falls back to software based rendering if your GPU is not capable.
Instead of disabling Aero, I just installed a custom theme and turned off all the transparency. I too found Aero to be too much of visual distraction; too many different colored elements with no consistency.
However, a subtle Aero theme is a considerable improvement of classic.
Select manage best performance (ie remove all the features) then turn back on the bottom 4 options. It gives you almost all the aero look but without the CPU/memory load
Unless you are running CUDA or openGL shader code, then anything that uses a GPU function brings you to a halt.
It took us a long time to work out why we getting crappy performance on some people's machines when the dev's with identical hardware were doing fine. Aero transparency does terrible things to the texture memory
