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Admin
That's MOST industries. The animation industry I work in is almost entirely based on who you know. But you still have to be good otherwise you could get quickly blacklisted. The only time I've found this problem really fall through is when someone is a good animator/designer/whatever but a total douchebag. A lot of people are willing to tolerate their BS because of their skills.
As far as new student hires and such, its usually college teachers who bring in the cream of the crop.
Admin
Yeah. I was in shock for a moment until I realized I had to click the little link above the box. That was 4 days ago, though, so I got over it.
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Don't mean to be rude, but does anyone else read Jake's postings two or three times looking for a missing punchline?
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Your comment lines up pretty good with the Irish girl!
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Ummm
[image]Admin
At least I'm not alone
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The Real Slashdot Effect: when a formerly decent site goes all to shit, but people keep going there anyhow because they're too lazy to change.
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A similar subject came up the other day in the vein of "I don't know it, but I'm a fast learner so I could pick it up".
I would feel comfortable hiring a PHP programmer to take a python, perl, or ASP position. Especially if the programmer had experience with more than one "web" language under their belt.
But I wouldn't necessarily hire a java programmer for a COBOL position. Or a FORTRAN expert to work on some PHP scripts.
There needs to be a good deal of crossover with the concepts unless the employee is being hired for long-term success. If you're dealing with a 6 month contract, you don't have time to wait for the new guy to learn C++, all your processes, and all your business logic.
Admin
I'm rather perterbed, I had the first post on this originally and someone nuked it! Bastards! It said "I wish I could get the two minutes of my life I spent reading this WTF back"
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Agreed. I've seen it happen in a few different places. However, I have a hard time believing it's different in any other field. I mean, doctors can only give an educated guess; mechanics are the same way; pretty much every specialized field relies on guessing based on what you know. The problem is not the field, it's the people. We all expect perfection but most don't deliver when it's our turn. It's like we feel obligated to give crap to the person who is providing a service. Probably based on the times we've been screwed over.
Admin
We got burned once before with a direct hire. He was a walking dictionary of technical terms, but couldn't code his way out of an endless loop. All of our interviews now include the developer writing code. I may start including a test on debugging. It amazes me the number of .NET candidates that have no idea how to debug in Visual Studio.
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Finally found the irish girl everyone keeps talking about, the pictures convinced me to turn of Adblock for this site...
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Indeed. Either the description in the story is very misleading, or the people running this project have a gift for finding incompetent implementors. I just built a handful of pages for a web app the other day, in clean, concise, commented, conformant XHTML and CSS, in a couple of hours the other day, and that's not an area I normally work in.
Clue one is table-driven layout, of course. If the designs couldn't easily and cleanly be implemented with CSS divs, floats, display types, sizing, and positioning, then the design needed reworking. If they could, then tables were the wrong choice. It's time to stop supporting archaic user agents and ugly layout hacks.
Admin
As an alternative to lying, heavy assertiveness can go a long way - being confident in what you do know and can do (and conversely, what you don't know and can't do). Most interviewers don't know what they're doing because they hire infrequently (and the ones that do probably don't know the job details well). If you were interviewed, you've already passed a large technical hurdle; now you're trying to be "the guy" - the person that they want to work with, go for beers with, etc, etc, etc. Personality counts for a lot - assuming you don't choke on the mandatory tech questions, of course. :)
Admin
(1) She's not Irish. (2) Apparently, you can't buy one without the stupid wrapping paper. I've tried. You'd have thought you'd get a discount or something, but apparently the Spitzer case is causing unexpected shipping problems. (3) Nice to know that y'all like redheads, since half of my family are redheads. We're kind of sick of being beaten on as the ugly step-children round here.
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Oh no, not the chin! I totally dig her - firecracker represent!
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Sharp knees!
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I "conquer."
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I "conquer."
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This is not a place to discuss the article. Discuss only the Irish Girl or GTFO!
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How do you know she's not irish? Sure fits the stereotype so far.
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You must not like women.
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Since when is protocol followed here? We also have a tag cloud, but do you think it actually has useful tags?
Admin
the real wtf is "renegociations". Who does the spell checks on these?
Free the mallocs! http://www.odierno.com Free software and cool t-shirts.
Admin
I was just about to say the same thing.
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I figured that the back end wouldn't really be complete. Oh well.
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Dammit! you kept talking and talking about the irish girl so I enabled javascript to see her and now I'm in love
Damn you all!!!
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Were my posts containing the larger versions not visible enough for you? They didn't require Javascript.
At any rate: Enjoy the firecracker's hotness!
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mmmmm, nope, those are probably blocked by my company's Websense... anyway, now I have a reason to check the site when I get home
Admin
God I hate when people criticize the looks of women on the interweb. You should be required to post a picture of yourself and all three women you have slept with in your life before being allowed to talk crap.
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You have so much Irish heritage you don't know what a SHAMROCK is, eh? You're probably looking forward to drinking green beer on 'St Patty's Day".
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Ewww.. beer. And I didn't say my parents are fresh off the boat. No one calls them shamrocks in the US.
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Okay. Guess I'm going to have to use my own space for images, then. Too many places have ImageShack banned. It's not like I come close to using up my bandwidth each month.
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But, that's ok. I'm not talking smack about Irish Girl. I was one of the first to point her out as being a firecracker.
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But we would all be able to see in the pixels and in the shadows that they are all photoshopped!
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When in a hole, keep digging. That always helps.The Irish national symbol is always referred to as the shamrock. Always. If it isn't, you're doing it wrong. Going with four leaves instead of three is another popular way of doing it wrong.
What "Irish heritage" do you suppose you're celebrating if you don't have the first clue of what's involved or why?
Admin
Long, flowing hair. The color is a nice bonus.
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Says the virgin.
I for one, uh, I-Irish I was there!
Admin
Where did I say celebrating? I said I bought a shirt because of it. Period. Nowhere did I say I was going out to the various drinking and leprechaun festivals that the local college kids are going to do. "Acknowledging" would be a more appropriate term for what I'm doing.
I apologize to the apparently Irish nationals in here that obviously took extreme offense to their national symbol being called a clover when at any other time that is its name around here.
Admin
The heritage of drinking pints of good beer in a pub with (optional) traditional Irish music... until I meet the floor.
Hey, any excuse to have a good time is welcome!
Heritage is overrated anyway :-P
Admin
http://www.bustedtees.com/bt/images/BT-stewartcolbert-gallery-1106.jpg
As to her Irishness: Can somebody ascertain that using her background and Google Earth?
Admin
I can't speak for her heritage, but I'm fairly sure she is born and bred American: this link provides some useful background information for potential stalkers.
As for this WTF, no comment. I don't consider it a WTF at all; my second-year software engineering lecturer told us a story like this every week for a year.
Admin
Agreed. Irish girl is cute. Though, as a prerequisite, you should probably have some natural attraction to redheads or at least irish girls.
Besides...it's a fun pun.
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Ok, I'll dig up a jpeg of myself, but do you think you could ask your mom if she still has any pictures of the 4-way I had with her, your sister, and your girlfriend?
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Look, I can be a predictable lame-o too: Did you get your mum to help you come up with that joke?
Admin
nah what's really great about being an in house developer is when your company decides to outsource a huge project, then has you develop it, all the while telling you that it's only for a demo, so you take shortcuts and write the nastiest code and most awful functions just to get a "month" long project working in five days.
Then they tell you that you have to give your code to the outsourced vendor because they aren't going to meet the deadline. How does a team of consultants not deliver a project quicker than one in house developer?
So I said screw it, I'll join the consultants :) At lease they aren't cost centers and some consulting firms actually have pretty amazing benefits.
Admin
someone posted that they were having a hard time landing an IT job.
Do you live in an urban area? I live in Chicago, and have about two years .NET (C# and VB) experience. Over the last year I've switched jobs twice. Each time I've looked for a job a total of two weeks. I'm guessing there's lots of .NET work out there.
As far as interviewing, the best thing you can do in my opinion is create a narrative. Don't just make yourself a keyword + length of experience candidate. There's a four year gap on my resume between my bachelors and first real world programming job. They always ask about it. So i tell them that during that time I was a photographer and videographer for the porn industry. If it's a guy recruiting me it always leads to an itneresting conversation and they remember me. Seems to work for me.