True, unless you can't pay your bills. I took my job before last in that situation. It was for a C# job maintaining a legacy app for $45k/yr. We were literally selling stuff to pay our bills at that point, so I had to take it. It turned out to be a great job with a great employer. I left to join a startup but then back a year later when they offered me a 50% salary increase to come back.
The 'sell my stuff to pay bills' phase was during the height of the meltdown; I was literally applying for janitorial jobs we were so desperate at that point.
I would agree that that's the perception, and certainly the case with some of their products (I'm thinking of IE and Vista, among others), but Windows 7, Xbox Live, Zune music software, and the ZuneHD/Windows 7 Phone Series are all pretty darn good products. Oh, and Bing. Bing is actually great. That's not to say they're going to be successful, but they've definitely been innovating in recent years. They've simply been eclipsed by both Apple and Google in the media.
And I have a hard time agreeing the horizon is bleak when they still have like 80-90% marketshare in desktop OSs, Office Suite, and Exchange. I work with Dynamics AX at work, something no one's ever heard of, and it makes them like a billion dollars a year in revenue.
It does look bleak on the mobile and tablet horizons, which are certainly the growth markets, but I'm not ready to write off Microsoft there yet. Perhaps Windows 7 Phone Series will bomb and perhaps not, but they started off in the hole on desktop OSs and word processing and spreadsheets as well. And they succeeded there with inferior products for the most part.
Personally, I'm cheering for the Google model over the MSFT and Apple models. But none of them seem to be facing an early 90's Apple-style crash anytime soon. Should be fun to watch any way it turns out, though.
All good points, but can we really afford to be picky when we're job hunting in this economy?
I do suppose a better listing leads to better applicants.
I'm not sure which part of my response you consider not defending.
Throwing MA out there as 'proof' that the government can drive insurance companies out of business when the MA legislation has done no such thing, and even if it had driven companies out of business, the model and environment for the MA legislation is so different from the ACA legislation is hardly support for your argument.
Well, first of all, I think providing medical care to the poor outweighs keeping super profitable insurance companies in business. This country would be a LOT better off if we DID drive every insurance company out of business while providing higher quality healthcare to all of our citizens. We're the richest country in the world and our healthcare quality isn't even in the top 25. It's disgusting.
Secondly, MA has a public option, which radically alters the landscape for for-profit insurance providers, of which there are very few in MA. Most are non-profit. This is really a good thing, IMHO, but also means the MA model provides no evidence for Obamacare driving for-profit insurance providers out of business.
Thirdly, while the insurance companies wanted a better deal than the ACA gave them, overall it's going to be a net positive for them. We did just pass legislation requiring >30 million people purchase private insurance. Yes, the pre-existing condition requirement hurts them financially, as well as the rest of the regulations included, but, again, that's a good thing for us, even if it's bad for their bottom line.
Geez, I'm not even sure why I wasted my time attacking an article from American Thinker anyway.
Very very true. But they put it there to benefit themselves, not the applicant.
It sucks, but if they try to use your salary history to lowball you, that's when you negotiate. I'd just explain I felt I was previously underpaid and that the offer is too low. Of course, then you run the risk of not getting the job at all.
Yeah, Ballmer's not the most pleasant person, and it's easy and fun to hate Microsoft, but they've consistently made a LOT of money for 25+ straight years now. Jobs record is much spottier over that time frame, to say the least. Granted, Ballmer didn't take over till 2001 or whenever, but still, that Gassee article was myopic at best.
Wow, is this ever a load of partisan tripe. Anyone expecting private insurance companies to go out of business in America anytime soon is delusional. They wield too much influence. Not to mention despite his 'poor insurance companies only have a 4% margin', they make a crapton of money as is. Without a public option, that profit is here to stay.
It's very common. The purpose is really twofold: they want to make sure they aren't going to waste their time hiring you for a $15/hr job when you've made double that for the last 5 years and are likely to leave when something better comes along, and also to give them a leg up in the salary negotiation/offer phase.
I've read advice articles saying not to answer the question, but when we were hiring people, refusing to answer would have been a HUGE negative.
Yeah, other than Rails, I pretty much agree. I actually prefer Vim on windows to Vim on *nix, (I guess I'm mostly speaking of gVim),Visual Studio is terrific if you don't mind working in .NET, Eclipse and Netbeans are equally mature on Windows, and if you spend a lot of time in the command line, Powershell is really a better Bash in a lot of ways (still needs persistent command history though).
That all makes sense. I actually do a lot of time-killing blog reading on my Blackberry, of all things, so I could see it being cool for that. I'm just not in an income bracket where I can drop that kind of money for that kind of gadget, since it falls so squarely between a smartphone and a laptop. Perhaps when I do have the cash, I'll pick one up.
That good of an experience? I'm genuinely curious, how is it "interacting with knowledge, entertainment, my pictures, and the web in ways that I had never done so before"? Is it not still just Safari Mobile? That's just a web browser. Without a keyboard. I love Safari mobile on my wife's iPhone, but I still prefer having a keyboard and spending half as much for a netbook that does everything the iPad does and more.
That's fine, but don't sell your tutorial as 'works in every browser'. The article is giving CSS hints that just won't work in IE<8 (and frankly, I've had very sketchy luck with 8 as well). That creates more work than it saves in some cases.
Where has IE fallen below 50%? I'd like to move there.
I'm all about that, but quite a few of the jQuery plugins I've tried to use lately just flat break things in IE<8. I've had to back quite a few changes out.
Nifty, but I could see this causing aggravation on the backend (i.e. using the data from one generation of your form to another). Still, very flexible.
What is it with all the CSS articles/tutorials out there that rely on functionality that won't work in IE? I loathe IE with the fiery passion of a thousand suns, but if your tutorial for an image-free drop shadow technique won't work in it, you're wasting my time. 90% of my end-users use some form of IE.
Lumbar punctures for children in a study designed to strengthen a bogus lawsuit? Yikes! That makes me angrier at the parents that volunteered(/were paid for) their kids' participation than at the doctor. Though still pretty angry at him, too.
Fair enough. I do nearly 100% web development, so I haven't messed with those yet.
They still don't give you anymore language interoperability than anything else, though.
I'm not saying I don't like to get out of the .NET box; I do.
But the point was within a single framework you have multiple languages that work well together.
I'm fairly language agnostic, but out of curiousity, what language doesn't .NET have that you want to work with? All my (language-y/syntaxy) needs are pretty much filled between IronRuby, IronPython, C#, and now F#.
Terrific post, but he's overlooking the .NET framework. It has successfully made "cross-language interoperability work well." Granted, you're limited to windows programming, but that's not his point.
Moreover, you could even argue that C# has overtaken VB as the dominant language for programming on the .NET platform.
Except it's what came with my full-size 27'' beast of an iMac. That sort of thing should come with a full keyboard or something that's supposed to be a substitute for it.
If I'd gotten it with a laptop purchase, then yeah, I wouldn't be complaining. It would be pretty cool for that.
It works fine with Vim, but not XCode or Visual Studio, which are my two primary uses for the iMac purchase.
I'm using it for both. I find it tolerable under OSX (precisely because of the Command key thing), though I don't like chording for things when there's a perfectly good one key option (like delete, home and end). And how do you Shift+Home/End for selecting? I forget, I know it's possible, but it's also a pain.
I finally just punted and bought a Logitech Wave for it. I like it much better.
Perhaps you're right. I guess it's more of a keyboard efficiency thing. I can still DO everything I can on a full keyboard, just much less efficiently.
Maybe from a hardware perspective, but not from a usability perspective. No right control key. No page up or page down. No home or end. No delete key. No number keypad. I was in love with the ergonomics of it...for about a day.
I'm trying to figure out when Apple wasn't "The Man". Even when they were slugging it out with M$ and IBM in the 80s, they weren't small potatoes. And frequently engaged in scorched earth business practices.
They reached an agreement over standing patents with one of their business partners. That's hardly a dick move. Now, if they'd sued a 50 person startup into oblivion over a questionable set of patents, that's a different story. But that's not what they did.
Well, I think software patents are inherently broken anyway. But I can't fault a company for trying to leverage that type of thing if the system allows it.