Someone just posted this to my FB feed: http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesleadershipforum/2011/11/09/growing-up-when-everyone-wins-how-do-kids-learn-to-win/It's yet another article decrying sports leagues where everyone gets a trophy just for playing.  This is what the author blames for the problem of his young new hires acting like they're ( Read more... )

...to have a recruiter contact you about a job in your own organization. Now, to be fair, my online resume never indicates who my current employer is, so the poor guy had no way of knowing. But it's still entertaining to see an ad for a job whose candidates I'll be (and have been recently) interviewing ( Read more... )

When I'm doing candidate interviews, I like to ask the people to tell me their best horror stories. It's not so much the story, but they way they tell it that I'm interested in. I want to hear that they're proud of what they did, even if it's something they hope never to go through again as long as they live. This tells me a lot about how they ( Read more... )

OK, the big fun this past spring at work was consolidating office space. We got rid of about half, and there are still empty desks. This is what happens when you're seven years into a major project and the heavy lifting is done ( Read more... )

...let me say for the record that I SUCK at Perl ( Read more... )

[Remember that I wear blue jeans to work almost every day. When the bigwigs come, it's Dockers ( Read more... )

And by that I mean working, i.e., that thing you do to kill time between layoffs.

Five years ago today was my first day at SAIC, or as I affectionately put it, the Big Evil Defense Contractor, a 40,000+ employee company that most people have never heard of. Our project is 15% of a very large contract with the US Army, the other 85% being Boeing ( Read more... )

I'm a long-time shell programmer, but I'm not that hot with Perl.

Most shells have a source command, analogous to C's #include. I have a bunch of Perl scripts that have hard-coded data that needs to be abstracted out, e.g.,

$my_site = "New Jersey";There will also be a couple small functions in the "if not cached, do the expensive thing then ( Read more... )

My first full-time job was 100% telecommuting. Between high school and college, I had a summer job with the local vocational-technical school to write an app that did estimations of students' program completion based on about half a dozen factors. They sent me home with a carload of Apple II stuff, and told me to let them know how I was doing ( Read more... )

So there's this perception that layoffs are a relatively new phenomenon in the American workplace, possibly starting with the major manufacturing job losses in the 1980s. Before that, the conventional wisdom goes, there was still the idea of "cradle to grave" employment. Even the word had a different meaning, sort of what we call "furloughing" ( Read more... )