• Fanik (unregistered) in reply to Bob... Billy Bob
    Bob... Billy Bob:
    The real WTF is all the crying mac users and apple fanbois with hurt feelings attempting to justify the laughable design choice of a single buttoned mouse as though it were the pinnacle of user interface enlightenment.

    No, TRWTF is using mouse button at all: http://www.dontclick.it/

  • Grig Larson (unregistered)
    • RE: "There are tools that do that. There have been tools that do that for years!"

    Yes, and my department built one. But to make sure it worked, we had to hire someone to do a parallel test manually. This was also back in 1999, and there weren't a whole lot of "web speed tools" back then.

    • RE: What kind of name is "Grig?"

    It's Swedish, short for Gregory.

  • JoJo (unregistered) in reply to BottomCod3r
    BottomCod3r:
    At my company, we make sure to hire competent engeneers by using a process with no less than 12 interviews. Sometimes, they would do multiple interviews the same day with a math test in the end of the day.

    PS: I am a TopCod3r biggest fan !

    12 Interviews? Pah! First we make them battle their way through the Valley of Death armed only with an HP 12C and then cross the bottomless Pit of Doom using a subset of Cobol and finally hey have to open the Immovable Gate of Thotharoth by solving Fermat's Last Theorem. And that's just to get in the front door....

  • (cs) in reply to Glow-in-the-dark

    I'm fairly sure that I'm not the first to come up with this sort of thing--to the point that my company only provides most of the referral bonus after 6 months, both as a rate limiter and as a quality check.

    Since neither of those restrictions are in place (yes this is a case of hindsight influencing foresight), this program is ripe for abuse.

    So much in fact that all attempts to change it will be rebuffed.

  • MacUser (unregistered)

    "...even right clicking (take that, Mac applicant)!"

    The author never uses a Mac. Any Mac user can right-click with the one-button Mighty Mouse. Do your homework.

  • Endo808 (unregistered)

    "The upshot of this is that a lot of unqualified boobs got hired"

    Am I the only person this really annoys?

    And upshot is a positive thing UP-SHOT i.e the point at which a downward curve shoots back up again. The opposite of an upshot is a downfall or perhaps better for this sentence a downside.

    Unless you think it's a good thing that lots of unqualified boobs got hired?!

  • Adi (unregistered) in reply to NSCoder

    When I google search for it, the first link is this article.. Amusing..

    http://www.google.com/search?q=capilistic

  • Lady Nocturne (unregistered) in reply to Bob
    Bob:
    Was it Mr. Buttle, in the server room with the candlestick er... I mean mouse?

    "I'm a butler."

    "What do you do?"

    "I buttle, sir."

  • (cs) in reply to Endo808
    Endo808:
    "The upshot of this is that a lot of unqualified boobs got hired"

    Am I the only person this really annoys?

    And upshot is a positive thing UP-SHOT i.e the point at which a downward curve shoots back up again. The opposite of an upshot is a downfall or perhaps better for this sentence a downside.

    Unless you think it's a good thing that lots of unqualified boobs got hired?!

    It would annoy me, if it had been used incorrectly.

    "Upshot" just means "the final outcome". It comes from archery where the "upshot" is the last shot of the match. There's no positive or negative connotations, apart from the fact that it has "up" at the start of it, which doesn't have to indicate a positive (you cheeky upstart, etc...)

    :)

  • Someone who doesn't invent their own definitions (unregistered) in reply to Endo808
    Endo808:
    "The upshot of this is that a lot of unqualified boobs got hired"

    Am I the only person this really annoys?

    And upshot is a positive thing UP-SHOT i.e the point at which a downward curve shoots back up again. The opposite of an upshot is a downfall or perhaps better for this sentence a downside.

    Unless you think it's a good thing that lots of unqualified boobs got hired?!

    http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=upshot

  • usitas (unregistered) in reply to danixdefcon5
    danixdefcon5:
    Jay:
    gabba:
    Gotta respect CommQuack. Not every company has the expertise to interview a philosopher intelligently.

    True. My company once hired a philosophy major to be a software engineer after an inadequate interview, only later to discover that he was completely unable to implement Anselm's Ontological Argument in Java.

    I know at least one thing that you can do:

    public boolean hamlet() { return (2B || !2B); }

    Refactor:

    public boolean hamlet() { return true; }

  • Robert S. Robbins (unregistered)

    In Pennsylvania, you just send home all the job applicants dressed like the Amish.

  • (cs) in reply to MacUser
    MacUser:
    "...even right clicking (take that, Mac applicant)!"

    The author never uses a Mac. Any Mac user can right-click with the one-button Mighty Mouse. Do your homework.

    Well, technically you're right in the sense that there is no other button to the right of its first and single button, and a click would be a left-click as much as a right-click. But I still want to have a button to open the context menu...

  • your name (unregistered)

    They obviously did the referrels wrong and so many of the posters here fail to understand that. The only way to make referrels work is to place a bounty on employees that STAY. My company pays referrels only on people that stick around for 90 days.

  • 50% Opacity (unregistered) in reply to Mr B
    Mr B:
    Endo808:
    Unless you think it's a good thing that lots of unqualified boobs got hired?!
    It would annoy me, *if* it had been used incorrectly.

    I don't care if he's using upshot correctly or not, or whether the hires are qualified or not, just get me some boobs!

  • the amazing null (unregistered) in reply to Kiss me I'm Polish
    Kiss me I'm Polish:
    jordanwb:
    realmerlyn:
    even right clicking (take that, Mac applicant)

    Hey, stop dissing on the Mac, using your decade-old view of what a Mac does. OS9 and OS X have had completely integrated support for multi-button mice from the beginning. Be nice.

    Certainly took them long enough. Windows had multibutton mouses in Windows 3.1 (possibly earlier)

    Using an Apple notebook, where you get to use only one button and not even a touchpad tapping to simulate clicks, I always feel like somebody just cut my fingers. I've just recently discovered they had some cryptic multitouch, which involves putting your TWO hands on the touchpad. I'm sorry, it's difficult to be nice ;,(

    yeah... or if the laptop was made in the last 6 years or so, you could just turn on the touch pad tap.

    if it was made in the last 3.5 or so, you could even turn on the "use two fingers on the tap as a control click" feature. as an OSX user, i can tell you there are enough things to rag on apple about. let's just give up the mouse myths once and for all though.

    you can multitouch one-handed. you can right click and all that.

    now, if someone could explain why some mac apps fake monitor burn in and squeeky key strokes as an aesthetic, that is something i would love to know...

  • Worldwalker (unregistered) in reply to Someone who doesn't invent their own definitions
    Someone who doesn't invent their own definitions:

    That was the most annoying interface I've seen in a long time. Things kept popping up all the time because I got too close to a button or something. The three other interface examples were even worse: they required too much precision of movement, for one thing, and the time-delay button was slow.

    It looks like the whole thing was designed from the point of view of "how can we build an interface without the Evil Mouse Click?" instead of "how can we build an interface that does the job better than what we have now?"

    Nice try, next time.

  • christophocles (unregistered)
    notice how no one likes to use Dell, HP or Lenovo trackpads, they all lug their mice around with them rsp. use the trackpoint?

    I like my Dell trackpad just fine, thanks. I enable scrolling on the right and bottom edges, and middle click is a top-left-corner tap. Works pretty good. And I do bring my mouse with me, but that's only for doing serious work that needs to be done rapidly. Trackpads are slower and harder to control than a mouse. I'll admit that Apple's trackpad is nicer than any other (other than the inferior one-button design), but I would still prefer a 2-button+scroll mouse over any trackpad, including Apple's.

    And don't get me started on the delete key...

    by ch.: What mouse is that? It looks like a bluetooth version of the G5. I've never seen it before and can't find it on Logitech's website. I really want one now.

  • TK (unregistered) in reply to BottomCod3r
    BottomCod3r:
    At my company, we make sure to hire competent engeneers by using a process with no less than 12 interviews.

    You just described my current employer.

    In addition to the crapload of interviews, it took just under a month for their approval process to complete. VP, CEO, CFO, and a hiring committee all have to approve all new hires individually. (Of course, the hiring committee is completely separate from all the people I interviewed, who also must say yes.)

    This in a company of several thousand employees.

    Although the hiring process was a big WTF, I've enjoyed the job itself so far.

  • Rowan (unregistered)

    His MSCE was from the mid 80's.

  • (cs) in reply to Grig Larson

    You have to admit that, if you draw four arrows on a thermostat knob, it looks very like to a router icon...

    As for Mr. Buttle, he didn't use a computer in the last 20 years?

  • Kafros (unregistered) in reply to tsr

    Comissions are good. You just need to put safeguards. If for example HR employee 1 has approved more than 2 employees that got fired with x-months, then you fire the HR employee (you also pay the comission only if the new employee stays in place, is good, etc)

  • vlpronj (unregistered) in reply to Smash King
    [image] Why the mockery? On the first "Office Suite" I used, the Atari joystick controller was leaps and bounds ahead of keyboard-only desktop publishing. Of course, I've heard they did make mice eventually for Commodore 64s, but GEOS worked great - and I didn't usually make yard sale posters at the same time I played Yar's Revenge, anyway!
  • (cs) in reply to usitas
    usitas:
    danixdefcon5:
    Jay:
    gabba:
    Gotta respect CommQuack. Not every company has the expertise to interview a philosopher intelligently.
    True. My company once hired a philosophy major to be a software engineer after an inadequate interview, only later to discover that he was completely unable to implement Anselm's Ontological Argument in Java.
    I know at least one thing that you can do: public boolean hamlet() { return (2B || !2B); }
    Refactor: public boolean hamlet() { return true; }
    Or, to actually make it vaguely resemble Hamlet: public soliloquy Hamlet() { 2B || !2B? "'Tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows...": "Stuff that for a lark, I'm off down the boozer!"; }
  • TekniCal (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    Chalito:
    I never really understood commissions, I mean on one hand it seems like a highly capilistic system, yet it always seems to fail in practice. What you end up with is people trying to get the "most" of anyting that's comissioned (sales, referrals whatever) instead of the best.

    Congratulations, you've just realised the main problem with capitalism :)

    While this may have happened at a basically capitalist institution, it is more typical of the problems of socialism. Under capitalism, people are rewarded in proportion to how they satisfy the customer efficiently. Give the customers what they want at a reasonable price, and they come back for more. Under socialism, people are rewarded in proportion to how they satisfy a bureaucrat's arbitrary rules, that have no direct relationship to satisfying the actual customer.

    Like in the United States for the past few years, banks have been rewarded by the government based on the number of mortgage loans they made to people from various demographic groups: basically they had to loan money to people from poor neighborhoods and to ethnic minorities. The probability that the money could be repaid was not a factor in the equation. (Well, except in the perverse sense that they were rewarded for loaning to poor people, and poor people are presumably less likely to be able to repay.) The results were a shocking surprise only to government officials.

    Good try, but it wasn't really like that, at all. The sub-prime lending fiasco was more like the Enron scandal. All of the institutions were effectively insuring each other's loans, and with deregulation, they set up incentive deals a LOT like the CommQuack HR people's.

    Optimistic projections cheaper insurance ??? Profit!!!

    (At least, until the whole thing came crashing down.)

    The problem had a lot more to do with fat cats than with po' folk.

    Captcha: odio (I agree)

    Many commission schemes give counter-productive results because they are arbitrary and poorly thought out. Like, a company I worked for many years ago considered giving programmers bonuses based on lines of code produced. They never implemented the plan, which is too bad, because I had it all worked out how to make a bundle. Like, never write "x=x+7;". Instead write "x=x+1;" seven times. Never use a loop, just copy and paste the same code repeatedly. Etc.

    In this case, an obvious better plan would be to pay the commission only if the new hire proved to be a good choice, like if he got a favorable rating on his first annual review or some such. Also, it creates a pretty obvious conflict of interest if an employee gets a bonus when a candidate that he proposes is hired, and that same employee or his friends have a say in which candidates are hired. That's like saying that the coach of one of the teams is also the umpire.

  • (cs) in reply to psb

    JMeter only gets the time that it takes to request headers. It does not count rendering time in multiple browsers. I haven't found a tool that does that yet.

  • (cs) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    My company once hired a philosophy major to be a software engineer after an inadequate interview, only later to discover that he was completely unable to implement Anselm's Ontological Argument in Java.

    So, he was not perfectly good, and therefore no longer exists are your company?

  • zdux (unregistered)

    One reason these companies get bad candidates is that it is common place in some countries (that rhyme with Bindia) to have a qualified individual (PhD) to take an over-the-phone-interview in place of the actual candidate. This became apparent to my company when the employees who arrived could not pass the exact same interview which they had previously passed with flying colors over the phone. When confronted with this one individual said that he did not see a problem with this practice as the phone-interviewee was an example of what the individual would become after gaining more experience.

  • Omega (unregistered) in reply to jordanwb
    jordanwb:
    realmerlyn:
    even right clicking (take that, Mac applicant)

    Hey, stop dissing on the Mac, using your decade-old view of what a Mac does. OS9 and OS X have had completely integrated support for multi-button mice from the beginning. Be nice.

    Certainly took them long enough. Windows had multibutton mouses in Windows 3.1 (possibly earlier)

    Earlier indeed. I used a 3-button Logitech mouse on my PC-AT, in DOS 6.22. Fairly sure earlier DOS versions also supported conventio 2-button (or more) mice.

  • Omega (unregistered) in reply to 50% Opacity
    50% Opacity:
    havokk:
    The one-button mouse was responsible for the worst atrocity in user interface design, the double-click.

    Ever tried to teach a complete newbie how to double-click? It's painful.

    Ever had users ask you "right click or left click"? Both are painful, really. And Windows uses both techniques extensively... ;-)

    I really hate when something, usually a game, maps an important function to clicking BOTH mouse buttons. And you usually can't even remap in such cases.

    I really should get a multi-button mouse, then I'd be able to map an extra button to do that function. And feel very vindico.

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