What's the Worst Job Posting You've Seen? 1214
Kickstart70 asks: "Recently myself and a number of friends of mine who work or worked in IT jobs have been remarking on absolutely horrible job postings for low-level IT jobs paying small change. It seems the headhunters and employers are still wanting knowledge in everything, at least one degree but preferably two, and want to keep employees on minimal wages (in the job listing linked, the wage is in Canadian dollars). Is this common everywhere? What's the worst job posting you have seen?"
Re:Requirements that end up in a checksum failure. (Score:2, Insightful)
Keep in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the 21st century (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's face it. IT salaries got way ahead of themselves in during the boom. Now the pendulum swings the other way
Have you looked at what a teacher makes or any other number of degree-requiring professions? CAD$40k might sound sucky to you, but I'm betting there's a lot of unemployed IT ppl out there right now who'd take it in a snap.
Re:Requirements that end up in a checksum failure. (Score:5, Insightful)
Job listing I want to see (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead we see:
Must have 10 years of programming in language A that has been around for 4 years. Most know X,Y,Z. We don't care if you can learn X,Y,Z or understand the theory behind X,Y,Z, you must know it because it is a nice buzz-word right now. Be prepared to unlearn X,Y,Z and learn G,H,J when they become the new buzzwords. We don't want you to think, we want you code!! code!! code!!
But I digress.
Re:Interesting requirements... (Score:5, Insightful)
17-19$ Goes a long way in Edmonton (I beleive thats where the job is) compared to lets say Vancouver or Toronto where you'd need at least 25$/hour.
You guys have to remember, you will have a better living standard with 17$/hour Canadian in Edmonton, than if your doing 30$/hour USD in Sillicon Valley.
be grateful for what you have (Score:4, Insightful)
After finding out that the raises one year would be much smaller than expected, a coworker of mine complained about it. I looked at him in bafflement, and told him he should be thankful to be getting a raise at all. He should be happy to have a job at all.
For that matter, I later reflected, he should be happy simply that he makes enough money to have food to eat, to provide for himself and his loved ones, and not to have to go to bed wondering where his next meal will be coming from. All of us that can say that should be thankful for it.
Yes, the job the submitter pointed to isn't spectacular pay, but it's enough to feed and clothe yourself in comfort. That's more than most people in the world can say. Try to keep a sense of perspective while you're busy complaining about things.
foreign workers (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Job listing I want to see (Score:0, Insightful)
You are obviously still in college or just graduated and seek your first real job.
If they need someone to do math they'll just hire a consultant with a math masters.
You're just a code monkey man, get used to it.
Re:Interesting requirements... (Score:1, Insightful)
Translation is a good business to be in. A good translator has real skills.
Re:Requirements that end up in a checksum failure. (Score:2, Insightful)
Employers and potential employees alike are best off avoiding such staffing companies, I think. It is a sad state of affairs when people actually think those charlatans will accomplish anything good.
Re:Welcome to the 21st century (Score:5, Insightful)
As an executive who out-sourced some work to India and also hires plenty of US talent, I can tell you that highly-skilled US programmers who understand the domain they are working in (health care, telecom, finance, etc) will still command top-dollar.
Just today (yes, today), I had a major schedule slip that could cost the company millions over that cheap labor. In their defense, the requirement that was given to them was incorrect, and they did a superb job of implementing the system. However, a US based programmer with knowledge of the domain (telecom in this case) would have recognized the requirement as incorrect and would have implemented correct code anyway. As an aside, she said the Big-5 consultancies do a horrible job and providing people with domain expertise, in spite of claims to the contrary.
Just this week I spent time with a fellow executive from a major ILEC. She told me that they are outsourcing Java work to India like there is no tommorow. However, highly-skilled programmers with true knowledge of the business are still paid as high as they ever were (which is my experience in my organization as well).
If you want my advise, learn the industry you want to work in. Programming skills are cheap, I don't care how good you are. Business knowledge is still a damn rarity. Business knowledge and the ability to implement it in systems is almost impossible to find. That means it is paid well for.
Oh yeah, most resumes I see from programmers who think they know the business don't know nearly as much as they think. Spend as much time learning the business as your programming skills, and I think you'll be fine.
Re:Real posting... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great way to get in lots of trouble. In the US, by law, you better be able to show an association between the requirements between what a you put on a job posting, and how it is necessary for work. Taking your example above, needing to be Fluent in Sanskrit. If I apply to that job I could go the EEOC and say that the requirements are BS and I am qualified and should have been hired.
Think of it another way, if I said (for an IT job), "blacks need not apply." Being black would have nothing to do with IT work, I would have my ass-served in a hand-basket to the EEOC. The company that let me post that would be in big trouble and I would likely to be out of a job.
To take another recent example, jobs that are requiring an SAT score. These companies said that having a high-SAT score related in could job performance. If they said that, they better be able to prove it (which I doubt). SAT scores are used to determine the grades of freshman going to college, not a mark to determine your job skills. You complain that you did not get a job because of your SAT scores that you took 10 years ago, you can get money out of those companies.
Just because a company says it true, does not make it true. They have an obligation to society to serve its interests as well as their own.
Re:Requirements that end up in a checksum failure. (Score:4, Insightful)
Mebbe. However, following the principle that one should first look to stupidity before one claims that there is conspiracy, I'd say that requirements like our example arises when a manager tells the job shop, ``I need someone with 6 years of experience with Windows. You know -- NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows XP." And the recruiter then decides to simplify the requirements by stating that the position requires ``6 years of experience with Windows XP."
And six months later, the recruiter can't understand why he isn't making his quota.
Geoff
Re:be grateful for what you have (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, come ON. This "well, at least we're making enough to get by!" attitude is being seriously exploited by those with "let's take all we possibly can" attitudes. Yes, it's good to be satisfied with what you have in a philosophical sense, but when you're dealing with the world of capitalism it makes perfect sense to do everything you possibly can (including unionization, etc.) to get as much compensation for your services as humanly possible.
Re:be grateful for what you have (Score:5, Insightful)
If they think they can get you to do it without quitting, THEY WILL.
Just because I'm luckier than most in the world, doesn't mean I have to stand there and let some corporate goon give it to me in the ass.
Re:Job listing I want to see (Score:3, Insightful)
In the real world, programs that I write will run orders of magnitude faster than ones that you write. Of course, this may not matter to you, writing simple web or dialog box code that interfaces with a db containing a few thousand items(or less). But my code can scale to processing millions, even billions of items. Can you say that? Of course not, you wouldn't know the difference between an n^2 and a log(n) algorithm if it smacked you in the face.
You may be a code monkey, but I know the difference, and so do my employers and clients.
Re:Job listing I want to see (Score:2, Insightful)
It's pretty unreasonable to expect to find a job with such requirements (outside of a few highly-coveted nearly-academic positions, like a language designer for MS or Sun.) A business generally doesn't need to hire people to be Really Smart; they hire people to do some particular thing. If they can do that, bully.
A friend of mine and I were debating which we would hire if were in the position to do so: someone with a degree from a well-respected university CS program, or someone with a certification relevant to the position we'd be hiring him for. I chose the latter, hands down. I'm not really concerned if, say, my router person can prove a problem NP-complete. I am concerned about whether or not he can set up ACLs correctly. A CCNP I can be reasonably sure of competance in, but a college degree is an unknown when it comes to ability to implement.
This isn't meant as a disparagement of academic CS; I think anyone who wants to enter the field should at least have a BS to ensure that they have some understanding of the basics of what goes on in computers. However, a real CS program doesn't teach you how to implement things with current technologies in use in the business market. That's something you need to pick up to make that academic background relevant to a business, which is only going to make direct use of one part of it
I'm not kidding about academia as a job, either. If you really want to keep learning and applying a broad variety of things, go to grad school, get a job as a T.A., and aim for a professorship. You'll be happy you did.
Re:Job listing I want to see (Score:5, Insightful)
There's several theories around HR and hiring that are based on behavioural observations. ie that what you have done before, you will do again.(Yes you can change behaviours, but it's hard and takes a while, so you're better of hiring someone that has those behaviours already).
Basically, you ask questions that relate to the behaviours that you want. Eg, for a sysadmin, I need someone with integrity - that won't go stealing passwords, building backdoors, or downing the system if they happened to get laid off.So you can ask a question like "Everyone breaks the rules sometime. Is there a specific situation where you broke the rule that in retrospect you think you shouldn't have ?"
In effect, you keep probing for proof of past behaviour. Generalizations are not acceptable. You need specific instances. "Do you have an example of that?", "What specifically was your role?", "Could you be more specific?" etc
Some of you may have encountered this in interviews. There are some 'interview tip' sites that actually talk about this. It can be quite akward for both the interviewer and interviewee, but I have found it to be quite effective.
I have a theory that part of the effectiveness is that the interviewee has not been exposed to this before, so I usually ask if they are familiar with it up front and explain it may be unusual and somewhat uncomfortable, but don't worry, everyone else is going through the same hell.
Re:Lots of them here (Score:1, Insightful)
But I am a CTO and I do work for a CEO. And it seems to me that life is a bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
First, being a CEO is damn difficult. The problems a CEO deals with in a day, and the stress he/she manages, and the management abilities, and the ability to handle impossible situations, and the memory required, and the negotiation skills, and the 18-hour days 7 days a week, and so on and so forth, are very rare. Personally, I could not even come CLOSE to what our CEO does.
Second: making money is DAMN hard. If it was easy, we'd all be earning $150k a year. But it is NOT easy. the competition is always there, working harder. Every time you have a great product someone else has just made it cheaper in Taiwan. Every time you have a great idea someone executes it better becusae they have more programmers. And so on.
As a tech guy I am not denying tech's value, But it seems to me we should NOT ever underestimate the incredible skills of the men and women that create our wealth and keep our companies running.
Michael
Re:Real posting... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mail room (Score:3, Insightful)
I was rasied in an exceedingly poor family. To quote a song: "People that say 'Money is the root of all that kills' have never had the joy of a welfare Christmas."
We were so poor, we didn't even qualify for welfare (actually, we were denied welfare because we were white... we were told that if we were a minority, we would have qualified. I like to spin the story to "too poor to get welfare," I find it more amusing than the sad truth).
My wife's first and foremost responsibility is to raise our children. Mine is to feed them. You can call me sexist, or money hungry, or anything you want, but my children will never know want the way I did, and if that requires me to work 24 hours a day for the rest of my life, so be it.
Fortunatly, I am quite successful and do get plenty of time for family, and have plenty of money. That has not always been the case, and there was a time in my life where I would work 40 straight hours, sleep 6 to 8, then do it again. If I ever need to work that way again to provide my family a comfortable lifestyle, I will.
As if having ambition in your job is a virtue. How about having ambition in being a better human being. How about having ambition to do the right thing. Are people in Greenpeace ambition free ... I think not. I think they are a lot more ambitious than most of us here ...
Don't get me started on Greenpeace. In my experience, most have no understanding of what it is they are protesting. How many anti-Globalization types (of which most Greenpeaces-types ascribe) actually truly know what globalization is? Give those types some ambition to learn and have an informed opinion. They would do more good getting a job, working during their protesting time, and send their pay to feed starving people. But that wouldn't be as cool, I guess.
Want to know how many starving people those jerks could feed? I once fed over a dozen people enough food for 3 days in South Asia for less than 1 US dollar. But, thats not as cool and sexy as protesting, and will never land you on TV or get you laid, so I guess they don't want to do that.
Re:Lots of them here (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Interesting requirements... (Score:4, Insightful)
(remembering a translated manual referring to "water-sheep")
fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. (Score:1, Insightful)
Executives, as a class, know nothing of the fields they command and are overpaid for what they do. Fuck you for telling people who know more than you do that they don't know enough.
Just today (yes, today), I had a major schedule slip that could cost the company millions over that cheap labor.
I hope it cost you and the people that trusted you plenty. You deserve it for giving industry specific trianing offshore for price while advocating that people need more of the same. Fuck you for denying people the thing you advocate.
Business knowledge is still a damn rarity. Business knowledge and the ability to implement it in systems is almost impossible to find.
That would be because companies have not really hired and trained skilled people since the early 80's, no? So you and your fellow "executives" reap what you sow. Just wait till all those people who do know what they are doing and put up with your BS for the last 20 years reach reitrement. Fuck you 20 years of bullshit, that's what your stock portolio is worth.
Oh yeah, most resumes I see from programmers who think they know the business don't know nearly as much as they think. Spend as much time learning the business as your programming skills, and I think you'll be fine.
You only think you can tell. If you really know so much, you would have caught the spec error that you sent to India AND having fucked up, you could fix it yourself. Fuck you for your attitude and get to work, bitch.
Re:Job listing I want to see (Score:1, Insightful)
"In the real world, programs that I write will run orders of magnitude faster than ones that you write."... "But my code can scale to processing millions, even billions of items."
The difference is that your software will never have to scale to millions or even billions of items because no one will use it due to the fact that you are so worried about getting your code to run as fast is it possably can that you forget that users actually have to use the software, and the software has to solve real business problems that involve a little more then simply understanding the difference between n^2 and a log(n)
Re:Worst I've seen (Score:3, Insightful)
80 hour weeks for $45K/year is like $22.5K/year for 40 hour weeks - not even that, since the second 40 hours per week are a lot harder than the first 40. Sorry, but people who pride themselves on giving everything in exchange for nothing (and look down on others who won't) are fools. (Not that I wouldn't want such self-sacrificing fools to work for me if I owned a business, because I would.)
I've got one that's worse. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting that you assume as an executive I don't know much about the IT systems I oversee. Would it suprise you to learn that I have published papers, articles, and a book on the subjects of distributed and parallel computing as well as object-oriented design theory? I rose through the ranks with technical skills, not business skills. I learned my business skills on the job.
I have hired as many people since the "bubble-burst" in March 2000 in the US as in India (actually, probably a bit more in the US). Of course, that probably interfers with your world-view of my type. I have also spent no training money in India, but plenty in the US. I require my outsourcing company to provide trained people, but I hire "fresh" people and train them routinely. Of course, that probably interferes with your world-view of my type as well.
You are free to think I am overpaid, but I can point to plenty of my fellow executives (defined as Director level and above by most business-experts) that make well less that highly-skilled software engineers.
The spec error I missed was buried in hundreds of pages of specs, reviewed by teams of people. You may find this hard to believe, but I have never in my life seen a perfect spec. If you pick up great works of fine literature, you can easily find spelling and gramatical errors. The mistake that I missed was a single missing word.
But, you obviously have a view that no one can change. I feel sorry for people who are so convinced they know everything.
Re:Keep in mind (Score:5, Insightful)
When there's a perception that the employee should be thankful for any job they can get, the employer is free to screw them over.
Re:Lots of them here (Score:5, Insightful)
Enough to justify that the average CEO get a 1000 times in wages what his engineers get?
Re:Job listing I want to see (Score:3, Insightful)
Certainly it is reasonable to hire someone with some knowledge of the problem domain, but picking up someone who is not a complete idiot tends to pay off far more in the long run (at least in my experience).
Business knowledge is still a damn rarity (Score:3, Insightful)
A little less corruption and more competance in business would be a good thing. I now work for a company with very transpanent accounting, and have a compentent boss. A previous boss failed to supply electricity to a major city for over a month, but I'm sure "Quality" was maintained.
Bad Job Description (Score:3, Insightful)
They really should have made this clearer in the description though
Re:Welcome to the 21st century (Score:2, Insightful)
Sending work off-shore to save a few bucks, is an exploitation of a low standard of living. Simple as that. Only IT could get away with what The Gap does every day, and get patted on the back for it.
Your thinking is short sighted and selfish. You advocate knowing business? I want to know business, but not your business. Complacency is the same as ignorance, and is the greatest sin.
Re:Lots of them here (Score:3, Insightful)
But it is NOT easy. the competition is always there, working harder. Every time you have a great product someone else has just made it cheaper in Taiwan.
Uh, wouldn't this justify paying every programmer, designer, tech writer, etc, exhorbinant pays because it's "damn hard" to make money? You carry this on with:
As a tech guy I am not denying tech's value, But it seems to me we should NOT ever underestimate the incredible skills of the men and women that create our wealth and keep our companies running.
This seriously leads me to believe that your post is nothing more than a troll. The people who "create wealth" are the people that design and create the profit centers. Secondly, CEOs of public companies seldom own even more than a marginal percentage of the company - they walked into the situation generally because all of their friends sit on the board. The current running of public companies is absolutely criminal.
What extraordinary skill does the CEO bring to the table that justifies the unbelievable theft-from-within that is most CEO pays? Nothing justifies it. The reality is that a CEO position is indeed a necessary node on the org chart (a corporation needs someone at the steering wheel), but the person filling that role is not nearly as rare as is often made out, and usually is someone to basically tally the "votes" offered by all of the vice-presidents and directors to chart the course of the organization, and they most certainly don't need the sorts of incentives that they get dropped on their plate (531x the average workers pay? That is absolutely insane. Again - These people often didn't start the company, they have no loyalty to the company, and their only ownership is shares that they had to be GIVEN that they usually unload as quickly as they vest). Indeed, survey after survey have found that there is extremely little correlation (if any) between CEO pay and company performance.
Re:fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hm. I can't help but notice the humor here. And by humor I mean "the fact that you are a complete and total hypocritical asshole"
Honestly, how can you smack this guy down for claiming he knows something about what other people do right after you've presumed to know all about his job and what he knows or doesn't know?
You are a tool, my friend, in every sense of the word. And your attitude completely betrays the truth of this statement... you're very bitter about your tool status. Sorry. Maybe next life!
Re:Real posting... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Lots of them here (Score:4, Insightful)
CEOs aren't the only ones that work 18 hour days, and most of the others that DO work those kind of hours don't get to spend a good portion of them on the golf course or at lunch with business associates.
But it seems to me we should NOT ever underestimate the incredible skills of the men and women that create our wealth and keep our companies running.
I'm glad your boss inspires you with his skill and leadership, but most of these yahoos running companies are self-serving greedy pigs that do not give a god damn rat's ass about the company OR their employees' well-being. Else, you would see more company loyalty and less bitching. You're a CTO, you're at the top of the food chain, so your commentary about how valuable the CEO is to the people that bust their ASSES making money for companies like yours is meaningless. Put some time in the trenches of a company run by your typical night-school MBA executives and you'll understand what I mean. Until then, put your toys away, get back in your Escalade, and stfu.
Re:Lots of them here (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Lots of them here (Score:3, Insightful)
Your boss must read /. I can't think of any other reason for being such a sycophant.
The real truth, Michael, is that the average CEO is indeed a hard working individual, but not so hard that he deserves to make hundreds of times the rate of pay of his line employees. His hard work, after all, is one component of the job. If any CEO is doing it all himself, he either is a company of one employee, or he needs to learn to delegate.
Oh, and about it being damned hard to make money? Not really; you just have to have the insight needed to supply a demand that will support it. And that insight usually arrives as a result of lightning flash, rather than being laboriously crafted from nothing.
Re:Lots of them here (Score:5, Insightful)
Few CEOs "created" the successful company that they're now pillaging. If they did, they seldom have huge compensation because they already have a massive investment in the company (see Bill Gates - I don't hear anyone complaining about Bill's compensation). Where they were a founder and they're now pillaging, that's usually a sign that it's going down the toilet.
So.. why not be the CEO then? If it's so easy to do, why isn't everyone doing it? Part of the skill isn't just in the work required to BE a CEO, but the fairly diverse skill set required to BECOME one in the first place.
If only the world were so ideal. Your commentary is largely as realistic as telling a peasant in feudalist England that if being a Lord is so easy, why don't they just go and be one. Most CEOs are the spawn of powerful families with powerful connections and tremendous wealth - I think you'll find very few biographies that start in a poor ghetto.
The reality is that most CEO's are truly good people. They work hard, and work to make their companies as good as possible.
No one said that they aren't good people, but there is an element to human greed that comes into play when people are given such unchecked power. Read the book Animal Farm (or re-read it) as it's quite insightful.
As far as CEOs working as hard as they can to make "their" company (sure it's their's...once their $10 million in "incentive" stock options vest so they can immediately divest them) successful, how about this: You, Mrs. CEO, have the right to put down as much of your family's hard earned money as you want, on the open market, to buy company shares. I know that you'll be so dedicated, so talented, so visionary, that this will be nothing less than an extraordinary investment as you steer the organization to success. We will all applaud you when you reap the rewards of good stewardship.
Oh, what's that? You don't want to risk a penny of your money on this dump? You insist that we give you ridiculously under-priced stock options with no time-limitations? You insist that we line your contract with departure bonuses so no matter how much you screw up you're guaranteed a wealthy future regardless? You insist that there is rampant inbreeding among boards that you and all of your friends sit on, basically putting the wolves in charge of the hen house?
Oooh, sounds like a deal to me.
Re:Focus on the Family (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of times, these Christian organizations are living on donations, or the coffers of a tightwad church. It's the story in many denominations, with exception of the blind-leading-blind (but pay us with $$) evangelicals.
Most positions in Christian (or any religion, I imagine) organizations are not going to be high paying or glamorous. There are people out there that would accept the position based on the fact that they are a Christian organization alone, such is the way faith is. I'm not too sure how much the cost of living in Colorado Springs is, but if it's as much as Boulder, it'd be rather difficult to keep the position without another job.
There's no such thing as moral wages. Wages don't do actions based on ethical decisions. The organization probably pays what it can. That $28k may be one of the highest paid positions that they've got.
Re:Lots of them here (Score:2, Insightful)
I really feel that you have never worked for a CEO who really cared about his business or his people. You use the word "most", but I feel I should provide a counterpoint.
I'm not a CEO, but I have worked for one who honestly cared and wanted to makes his people as rich/successful as he is.
He worked for 3 years without drawing salary. He paid all travel expenses out of pocket. He was in at 5:30 AM every day, and left after 8pm (I don't know when, because I was only putting in 14 hour days from 6-8). In nearly any area the guy was scary-smart, but he did approve a more than 200% raise for me because he knew I was working my ass off for the company.
Certainly not all of them deserve what they get, but some do and I just wanted to mention it. There is even a startup in the local area with some very familiar management. I know that they remember me and the other people who worked haed for them.
I guess that my point is that being a CEO is like a lot of other things. You hear about the bad ones, but there are no stories about the ones who really do try.
Wiretapping?? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a Sysadmin you have full rights to anything on the servers and LAN that you or your employers own. Wiretapping does not come into play unless the government does it, or the government has somone do it as their agent. The only type of recording employers can not do is voice without the notifying their employees that they are subject to monitoring and recording. (However in Penna, you have to have the consent of both parties for a voice recording.)
Email belongs to the boss, all your surfing habits belong to the boss. Hell anything you do on your home machine is subject to whatever your employer wants to do if you connect to their network and use just one piece of software supplied by them.
Tell your source to try looking at the laws on search and siezure before giving you false legal info.
There is no "Title X", Many statutes and laws have titles that exceed X (10 in Roman Numerals) but Title X of what law? what statute?
IANAL, but IAALS (I am a Law Student) and I suggest that you try reading:
ISBN 0-8493-1192-6, Cyber Crime Investigator's Field Guide by Bruce Middleton, Appendix G
or just go to US DOJ Computer Crime [usdoj.gov]
The Search and Seizure manual is here: S&S Manual.pfd [usdoj.gov]
HTML [usdoj.gov]
Short excerpt from page 7 of the pdf:
4. Private Searches
The Fourth Amendment does not apply to searches conducted by private parties who are not acting as agents of the government.
The Fourth Amendment "is wholly inapplicable to a search or seizure, even an unreasonable one, effected by a private individual not acting as an agent of the Government or with the participation or knowledge of any governmental official." United States v. Jacobsen, 466 U.S. 109, 113 (1984) (internal quotation omitted). As a result, no violation of the Fourth Amendment occurs when a private individual acting on his own accord conducts a search and makes the results available to law enforcement. See id. For example, in United States v. Hall, 142 F.3d 988 (7th Cir. 1998), the defendant took his computer to a private computer specialist for repairs. In the course of evaluating the defendant's computer, the repairman observed that many files stored on the computer had filenames characteristic of child pornography.
The repairman accessed the files, saw that they did in fact contain child pornography, and then contacted the state police. The tip led to a warrant, the defendant's arrest, and his conviction for child pornography offenses. On appeal, the Seventh Circuit rejected the defendant's claim that the repairman's warrantless search through the computer violated the Fourth Amendment.
Because the repairman's search was conducted on his own, the court held, the Fourth Amendment did not apply to the search or his later description of the evidence to the state police. See id. at 993. See also United States v. Kennedy, 81 F. Supp. 2d 1103, 1112 (D. Kan. 2000)
(concluding that searches of defendant's computer over the Internet by an anonymous caller and employees of a private ISP did not violate Fourth Amendment because there was no evidence that the government was involved in the search).
c) Employer Searches in Private-Sector Workplaces Warrantless workplace searches by private employers rarely violate the Fourth Amendment. So long as the employer is not acting as an instrument or agent of the Government at the time of the search, the search is a private search and the Fourth Amendment does not apply. See Skinner v. Railway Labor Executives' Ass'n, 489 U.S. 602, 614 (1989).
Now, if you or your employer is privy to illegal activity online, you are duty bound to report it, or face the consequences as a conspirator. Whoever is giving you that "title X" line is setting you up for a fall!
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Real posting... (Score:1, Insightful)
Not bad... (Score:3, Insightful)
IF WE DON'T UNIONIZE INFO-TECH, NONE OF US WILL BE LEFT TO SPEAK FOR.
UNIONIZE NOW!
Re:Lots of them here (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a generally pervasive social condition that CEOs have extremely high pay rates. Why? Corruption and cronyism at the top of a profitable company aren't enough to sink a company, and such things are extremely attractive. I'm, frankly, amazed at the general level of dishonesty and self-serving behavior exhibited by top-level folks I've seen.
There are a couple of legitimate potential reasons to pay your CEO a lot of money. The first is that CEO candidates are extremely rare -- much like how a scientist in an extremely new and lucrative materials science field might make a healthy salary. I don't buy this. There are a ton of business graduates each year. A business degree is one of the easiest degrees to get. MBA work is absolutely trivial compared to something like a good hard science *undergrad* degree.
Another possibility is that you are really getting a lot of quality for your money. Again, aside from connections (which ties back into the whole dishonest cronyism that I'm irritated about), I'm curious as to what kind of value a particular CEO candidate has that merits that he be paid thousands of times what his peers are paid. Given the degree to which markets are unpredictable and other factors, I have a hard time believing that past performance of companies a CEO has headed is a particularly strong indicator of future prediction. I'm *very* dubious that an expensive CEO (10 million a year) is better than a cheap CEO (100 thousand a year) plus 99 $100K/year engineers. That's an awful lot of additional product that you can provide.
A final possibility is that a job is so onerous that one must pay a phenomenal sum to get someone to do it. I don't buy it. At a good-sized company, VPs and above are generally treated awfully well. Business life is an ongoing series of company-paid conventions at fancy hotels and resorts. You may need to be ready to respond 24/7 if there's a corporate disaster (think 9/11), but I suspect that there are a lot of folks that would be in at work in another 9/11. You do run the risk of being a corporate scapegoat ("we fixed our problems by switching our CEO"), but if you work for just four years at $10 million a year, you have an awfully comfortable retirement lined up.
I suspect that most companies could get by with significantly less management than they have.
Another issue to take into account -- in traditional business from a hundred years ago (say, manufacturing), the higher level employees tended to get promoted "from the ranks". Your plant manager was (roughly, and in ideal) the most competent of your middle managers, who were the most competent of your low-level managers, who were the most competent of your bottom-line workers. It made a lot of sense to maintain a pay hierarchy.
That is not the case any more. You generally don't have any folks in the upper ranks (VP and up) that worked their way up from the bottom. There is no even approximation of a meritocracy. You hire business students to become execs. Furthermore, a big move has been made to make business a generic field -- business schools produce students that are interchangable between various companies. An exec generally does *not* have much domain knowledge about his company. He knows a set of business models and processes, how to interpret charts, and the like. As a result, the folks populating executive and engineering positions are drawn from entirely different stock. Execs have business degrees, engineers have engineering degrees. The legacy of a pay hierarchy still happens to live on, however, despite the fact that it requires much less rigorous education to become a business student, and that there is a larger available pool.
All that being said, I (an engineer) don't care too much. If I wanted to earn more money, there are a lot of things that I could do that would improve my salary. However, I pretty much eat, drink, and live my field, on the job and off, so I'm pr
Re:HR and CEO's holding their breath (Score:2, Insightful)
The following is a general rant, not directly in reply to the parent.
I'm sick of people here trashing the Socialists. I'm not saying that they're perfect, but if it weren't for them, we'd be working 100hr 7-day weeks. That's right, the socialists brought us such terrible things as weekends off, medical benefits, safety regulations, and the 40hr work week. That's what you get when you put people before profit. It can work in a 100% capitalistic society too -- just add human, social, and environmental costs into the profit/loss equations and you'd have a much fairer system.
If we had fair trade laws, there wouldn't be a benefit to moving work to India because it would be balanced by a penalty tariff against India for having poor working conditions. By putting all of the worlds workers of equal footing, we could end this off-shoring trend. We could make all American companies pay the U.S. minimum wage to all of their workers everywhere. That would bring jobs back home real fast.
Re:Real posting... (Score:2, Insightful)
That is a theory conceived by those with average scores. ;-)
Stephen Jay Gould did the cannonical debunking of them in 'the mismeasure of man'.
To quote an interesting analysis of "The Mismeasure of Man" [mugu.com]:
"The biologist Bernard Davis (1983; see also Gould, 1984; Davis, 1984) called attention to the fact that reviews in the popular and literary press, such as The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books, were almost universally effusive in their approbation, whereas most reviews in scientific journals, such as Science (Samelson, 1982), Nature, and Science '82, tended to be critical on a number of counts. Davis cited Jensen's (1982) review in Contemporary Education Review as "the most extensive scientific analysis," but mentioned, as an exception, a generally laudatory review by Morrison that appeared in Scientific American because that joumal's editorial staff had "long seen the study of the genetics of intelligence as a threat to social justice" (Davis, 1983, p. 45)."
So, it appears the science involved in "The Mismeasure of Man" is suspect at best, and that there is a strong political motivation to the work.
When I was at high school I posted some IQ scores that were well outside the standard range - 160 to 180. That is because the school was a selective school and we had a weekly coaching session on the exam to get into the upper school. My scores went from upper decile to 2 to 3 standard deviations above the mean. All through coaching and practice.
From your writing it is clear you're highly intelligent. If you weren't, you never would have been able to score as well as you did on the tests, regardless of the amount of coaching. The SATs are even harder than some IQ tests, since the math portion involves lots of problem-solving.
Most people who take the tests aren't coached, regardless. I took the SATs once, with no special studying or coaching, and scored 750V/690M. That was top 1/10 of 1% in verbal, and top 1% in math.
Then when we got into the upper school we were told that research shows that the results are innate. I said the results had to be faulty since the entitre class of us had shown the same type of improvement (not necessarily as extreeme). Thats the point where I discovered that English public schools can hire some awfully stupid geography teachers. The science staff backed me up though.
You should read the link I included above carefully. I agree that everyone will show improvement through study, but the peak intelligence that people will reach is largely innate, in my opinion. I've tried very hard to teach certain concepts to certain people, and it was just basically impossible. These were not abnormal people, just "not that bright".
I've also had long discussions with a couple of (as it happens) female friends who state "I'm just not good at math". I felt they've received some kind of mental block related to sexual roles at an early age, and should just start studying it until they "get it". But they both claim that their minds just flat out "can't handle math". Laziness or hardwiring? You decide. (Both claim they would like to know math for various reasons.)
Odd thing was that despite all that testing the school never picked up the fact I have a form of dyslexia.
Obviously you've overcome that handicap. Congratulations.
Re:Interesting requirements... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering