epoxyhockey

Well, if you live in the Washington DC area, the chance substantially increases. ;-)

Though, if you have ever been in a position to gain a glimpse into strangers' behavior, be it what bars/pubs they frequent, how they make income on the side, what stocks they trade, or any number of not widely publicized tricks-of-a-trade, I can guarantee you that you would use that knowledge for your own gain and/or entertainment. Your use of that information is untraceable, and in the very worst case can be plausibly denied.

And here we are 7 years after one of his voice calls was recorded.

Maybe for you, personally, but not for a genuine terrorist.

Saying that domestic spying deters someone with a deep hatred of a country from committing an act of terrorism is like saying that gun laws reduce gang violence.

There is just no way to deter the will of sufficiently motivated person or group of people.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_serum#References

The lesson: most kids who crack systems as a self-declared white hat will be punished, some will get lucky with job offers (that they never seem to accept at the end of the day - humm).

Like the elders were advising 10-20 years ago: don't bother with trying to play by the rules. Start your own consulting firm or just keep it to yourself.

The best engineering teams I've encountered are ones that have an Engineering Manager. The hierarchy is Project/Program Manager -> Engineering Manager -> Engineers. The engineering manager (of technical background) cultivates the engineering team, instills best practices and makes final decisions, without having to sit in endless meetings with the business side (the program manager's job). The engineering manager is usually the hiring manager for more engineers.

It's not a sexy, flat organization, but day-to-day operations are less like herding cats and more about promoting technical excellence.

BTW, the Staff Squared homepage is really impressive! My eyes are directed to all of the right places on the page to sign-up and learn more. I also like that clicking the Roadmap link on the footer leads directly to the Trello project page.

In 2010, I didn't even get this far.

Agreed. If I recall correctly, the all-day pass was close to $30 when purchased while on the plane. By going to their website ahead of time (i.e. while not using gogo's network), their all-day pass is $14.

It is really fantastic for that live spreadsheet feel.

None of these anecdotes mean anything. Humans have strengths & weaknesses, experience & inexperience, interests & disinterests. Match the person with the job or train them if they aren't a 100% match.

To be fair, college is not trade school, nor is it supposed to be trade school.

on the job training is often the current solution

10-15 years ago, this was standard operating procedure for college grads, as were decent training budgets to keep all employees up to date on skills. Only more recently have employers demanded a turn-key candidate while training budgets have been cut back or zero'd out.

It's pretty worrisome for the future. Many individuals in this thread complaining about lack of qualified candidates may find themselves unqualified to a future employer if they don't value training.

What I hate seeing are articles from blogspam institutions like forbes and businessinsider, or others, that digest the primary source with a snazzier headline.

As far as frequency of NSA stories, this is obviously the strategy of the sources: leak bits and pieces over a long period of time. And, I don't mind that as long as there is just one copy of the information being voted up.

The depressing thing is that this interviewer probably went back to HR (if the company even had an HR department) and told them that you didn't know anything about basic sets (whatever that means).

The interviewer's line of questioning amounted to guess what number I'm thinking of that is between 1 and 100.

Keep your chin up, because it's not the end of the world. No one is immune to riding out a failing start-up; I've seen really bright and highly qualified engineers, who have just relocated their families to a new city, fall victim to a failing start-up. You have very marketable skills and will be able to find a new job faster than most people in other industries. Your CEO will beg you not to leave, and will have other employees guilt-trip you, but you need to figure out how long you want to go unpaid before leaving and stick to that threshold.

The funny thing is that you may find yourself in this same situation with another company in the future. It's a common game that start-up CEOs play and the faster you catch on for next time, the more control you have over the continuity of your employment and income. I.e. don't be afraid to cash your last paycheck and quit the very next day, without 2 weeks notice.

Money starts to run out and there is no cash flow. The first things that the company stops paying for are ... health insurance, taxes and unemployment insurance (you may not care, but this is important to you after you get laid off). Really crooked companies will also quietly steal your 401k contributions. Company perks also disappear.

Any external financial accounting agency is fired and not replaced.

Next, the company will stop paying vendors, and if they are a financial middle man to other companies, they will keep those monies as well.

Amazingly, a start-up can stay afloat for 1 year or longer by employing these tactics.

Next, the cash crunch hits harder. Paychecks are delayed, and a short time later, paychecks are issued on-time, but bounce when you try to deposit them. There are some tactics that you can use to make sure your paycheck clears before your coworkers' do, but I won't get into those details. As some money comes in the door, preferred/mission critical employees are paid while others are not. You might be asked to pay for things on your credit card that are actually company expenses, with the promise that you will be reimbursed.

All the while, your CEO will promise paychecks in a day or two, over and over again. You will go along with this because it's kind of a new and exciting thing to happen to you. It's also fun to meet your coworkers for happy hour and gossip about the situation.

Some people will start to quit and find new jobs. The CEO secretly breathes a sigh of relief because .. he/she won't have to be on the hook for unemployment insurance for that employee.

Eventually, the company collapses under financial pressure from creditors and investors. It's ugly and everyone gets laid off without receiving their last few paychecks. So, the next day, you go online and file for unemployment benefits. A few days later you get something in the mail saying that your unemployment benefits were denied.

After spending a couple of weeks proving that you were an employee by showing all of your pay stubs (which, by the way, it looks like you don't even have those!), you find out that since your company wasn't paying for unemployment insurance, the unemployment office is unable to pay you. You think this is crazy, because it's a government agency, but you are screwed. The local government starts going after your ex-company and its leadership, by threatening them with legal action and jail time. However, there is no money left in the company now, and you find out that the leadership weren't official employees of the company, only contractors. Maybe you'll get unemployment money in the future, but you'll likely find a new job before then.

You and your other laid-off coworkers hire a lawyer to try to recoup your last few paychecks. By this time, the company is totally dissolved. Not that there was any money left in the first place.

TL;DR: Your company is dying and you should leave now while you're only 1 paycheck behind.

Hundreds of thousands also had portions of their mortgages forgiven. One can also not deny that the Fed is keeping interest rates low, in part, because many home owners have HELOCs or other adjustable rate loans.

I agree with you that "doing what everybody else is doing" is not a free pass to be reckless and is not something to aspire to do.

I noticed this rule after the housing crash. If one person was underwater on their mortgage, no one would blink. But, when hundreds of thousands of people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) provide relief.

It seems impossible to limit someone's exposure on Facebook, especially when any 3rd party will happily post a photo of your family member online. I also suspect that untagging a person on FB is analogous to FB's soft-deleting of statuses. The damage is already done.

During the course of the meeting, it was my client that was kissing butt for a shot at getting some business in the Chinese market, and would pay this Chinese company for the privilege.

At the end of the meeting, my client quipped "don't spend too much [money here]" to which the Chinese visitor responded, "I'm Chinese, of course I spend too much."

The whole meeting was definitely a wake-up call for me, especially after hearing what came from a Chinese national in their early 20's.

EDIT: I will also note that things weren't all roses for the Chinese company trying to operate in a capitalistic fashion. There is a lot of (probably justified) paranoia that the Chinese government would come knocking and severely interrupt their business.

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In a few minutes, I have a multi-user website, complete with REST server and a user administration interface. As someone without a lot of hands-on experience with Laravel, is there a similar combo of Laravel bundles that can get me up and running with a multi-user website?