A little late to the show.
261 karma · joined November 9, 2011
I have been continuously employed or have had substantial contracting since 1999 (almost all regular employment, except for no more than a total of 12 months of various freelance).
I can only guess why, but it is probably some combination of:
1. When the layoffs came, I was in the non-laid-off remnant, probably because I always situated myself to know how everything worked, soup-to-nuts: code, databases, servers, etc.
2. Constant re-education, and willingness to use languages and tools I considered to have technical deficits (e.g., ColdFusion).
3. Constant teaching. Was always teaching Java or, later, Ruby in the evenings. Stayed sharp.
4. Constant networking. Very important -> I networked both at the tech level and at the business level. Keeping in touch with VPs of marketing and business development meant that when their cohort was looking for devs, the business-side VPs would think of me. Techie-to-techie referrals were nil.
5. Maturity. Was recruited into an executive position in 2002 perhaps because of attitude + tech skills.
This review, like many, fails to note that the data in question regards first- and second-year students (i.e., the second sample is in the third semester -- only 1 1/2 years after starting college). Many of us will recall that we made our big leaps in our junior and senior years, after declaring a major. In a later study, the authors claim that similar observations can be made regarding older students. Still, I would read this book with some skepticism.
For a more subtle review, try this one from the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/06/06/110...
before_save can modify the state of other objects. It doesn't have to. One might use it to modify only the state of the current model. You are reaching a bit, blaming the callback, when what you are really concerned with is an awkward and potentially dangerous use of the callback.
fib = lambda do |n|
return n if n < 2
fib[n-1] + fib[n-2]
end
puts fib[8]Meanwhile, while Google will now sign a HIPAA BAA, you have to give up parts of Google Apps once you go that route.
What about: High-quality, mission-driven, sustainable, impervious to fashion, self-motivated, resistant to the incursions of finance capital . . .
I could say similar things for the word "exit," since there are many different kinds of "exits," but I will leave that for someone else with more skin in that game.
Surely Brad means:
"Why is one forbidden from using a mobile phone in US Immigration areas?"
(Unless, of course, you specifically are forbidden to use a specific device -- an iPhone.)
The rhetoric of Malcolm Gladwell's work represents that of the "new historicism" in literary studies, which emerged in the 80s.
There is a common style to these works:
-- They start with a startling and interesting anecdote, and, basically, tell a story.
-- They leverage finding from various articles.
-- They use a lot of argumentative ju-jitsu. For example, when the author is going to basically attempt a kind of whopper, they will admit that there are some failing to the argument. The rhetorical tic for Greenblatt is to write: "To be sure . . ." to make the reader feel that, yes, there are other opinions, but I'm kind of right. Then they go barreling ahead with a highly contentious argument.
For Greenblatt and the literary historians who write about the past: Their claims are rarely falsifiable. Sometimes other scholars will say that the new historicists are "wrong," but it is not uncommon for the critics' basis for their own claims to be equally frail.
If you asked Greenblatt, he might not claim that what is describing is "true," but, rather, "good to think with." For the past, maybe that's reasonable.
But:
Gladwell is almost always talking about the present, and making claims that should be testable with a robust experiment. Very frequently, he will cite incredibly thin research (as Chris Chabris notes).
I think this is the essential problem:
Gladwell's style is OK if you can't really test the hypothesis (new historicism). But if you're talking about the here-and-now, you have to answer to a higher standard of argumentation.
Another Negropontean idea was that bits are bits. The notion of somehow partitioning server-like entities on the basis of their behavior doesn't fit, he argued, the architecture of the Internet.
Family historian Stephanie Coontz writes that today’s workforce is so demanding that families can only handle having one person in the workforce. She shows how the average work week does not allow for people to take care of children, which means that one partner needs to drop out of the workforce and take care of kids.
This is not Coontz's point at all. Coontz considers the status quo to be about "bad working conditions," and concludes (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/opinion/sunday/why-gender-...):
Our goal should be to develop work-life policies that enable people to put their gender values into practice. So let’s stop arguing about the hard choices women make and help more women and men avoid such hard choices. To do that, we must stop seeing work-family policy as a women’s issue and start seeing it as a human rights issue that affects parents, children, partners, singles and elders.
In other words, the the status quo is hard on people; the problem is in the nature of work. My bet is that Coontz would have a lot of issues with Mayer's order.
Is your customer actually making money? One thing you might propose is some kind of profit share based on your contribution. I.e., propose that you take a % of future profits. This would be a great incentive for you to do a great job for them; and the premise is that everyone is making money. By this means, you might avoid some of the agony of trading your own time for something unpredictable.
The 600,000 vs 1,000,000 means: A lot of Americans, and the excess are people who are not from the USA or have multiple accounts. But the main point is that in gross numbers many of those 600,000 have accounts.