I think a lot of it comes down to governments settling for crappy agreements. You do hear about businesses getting big tax breaks, then shutting down two years later. Smart agreements would allow the gov't to get some sort of restitution. Why not provide a future tax break? Put the taxes you'd normally pay in escrow and release them when the company meets it's obligations?
I just find the idea that private businesses are "taking advantage" of governments with these agreements. Really? A private company is pulling the wools over a sovereign power with the ability to create and enforce it's own laws?
I like the escrow idea. I've also seen forgivable loans based on certain obligations (hiring, salary levels, etc.)
But they are taking advantage of a bunch of things; local governments inability to govern certain areas (whether due to state or federal laws) or that the mayor is thinking about election time and who would say jobs are bad?
Definitely agree. I would argue that streaming has had the largest impact both because, as you mention, it makes for a better audience experience and it demonstrates the capabilities of PC gaming graphics-wise. Streamers and Let's Players have probably helped expose more games to a larger audience that would have previously not seen them.
I'd be curious if you are seeing the results of 'shotgun' style job searching. Sending your resume anywhere and everywhere with the hopes of getting a callback. I imagine that would make it difficult to research every possibility.
I was going to mention this exact same thing. The last time I had to go job hunting I submitted my resume to 40-50 companies each week or so, and unless I heard anything back ever, I did zero research outside of seeing if what they were looking for matched what I wanted to apply for.
I didn't quite follow the same approach recently... Was my first time looking for a job in several years. I sent out maybe 50 resumes and got callbacks on about half of them. I mainly applied locally. Also, updating my linked in profile got a lot more cold contacts than sending out resumes did.
I was pretty selective as far as finding a job, the interview process reduced the responses to about a third. In the end there were about 3-4 I was interested in, and one of them bumped up the offer to where it was about 20% more than the closest competing offer, so I decided to go with it.
However, I've got about 18-19 years of experience in my field (full stack software development, focusing on web applications), and stronger throughout the stack than most. Many of the positions were labelled "Senior" but the pay, and desired experience, didn't align with that statement in my opinion. It really just depends.
Having a strong resume will go a long way... having a summary statement with your desired position, goals and skills along with technology you are familiar with followed with work/project history reinforcing that experience will go a long way in terms of getting in the door.
Actually, one of my friends on Facebook saw that I was job hunting and offered me an interview. :/
I've gotten all of my best (and last few) jobs through connections, fortunately for me, and maybe unfortunately for me giving advice on how to get a job.
I'm specifically in the sysadmin/dba (and a little devops-y) side of things, and less in programming.
I believe this is definitely true, but I'm speaking of the first initial interview as well. It's not quite as bad as the top of the funnel, much higher quality, but still not the level of effort I was hoping for.
No. But I suspect his local MP will ask the Police to investigate. The officer who asked the police to pop round will probably be nagged for being naive. There may be a weak apology and it'll blow over. The damage I suspect will be for the politician who attempted to misuse a complaint about online bullying as political intimidation. UKIP won't be affected because they're a protest party, most people voting for them don't care about their tactics they see them as a single-issue party.
Graduating next week with a BS in Computer Science. Looking to relocate to CA. Looking for a web dev position. Google Summer of Code alum, interned in SF, been working in Ruby/Rails for a couple of years now.
I seriously don't agree with working for free for "exposure and experience". Didn't HN just have a couple of posts recently about the serious negatives of unpaid internships?
This is pretty tech-specific. In many other fields, unpaid internships are seen as a good deal, mostly because their are so few of them and so many applicants. A friend of mine who recently converted an (unpaid) internship to a job in DC worked really hard just to land the internship. At the same time, he was learning the job but in no way provided the same benefit to his employer as a tech intern does.
Sort of adding on to that, an unpaid opportunity doesn't have to be an unpaid internship. An unpaid opportunity could be a CS student in college working on the website for an on-campus club, for example, or a public relations student serving on the executive board as the PR chair of an on-campus organization.
I think when facing a choice of 'doing nothing' vs. working on an open source project or unpaid internship, a college student should choose the free exposure and experience. Sure, if you can get a paid internship or work in your field, do that. But if you haven't yet, free exposure and experience is a great way to do something positive.
Good point here and I'd have to agree with you. Sure, the unpaid route isn't ideal, but then again neither is an internship in general. The whole point of an internship is to gain experience/see if you're a fit for working at the company full-time. Now, in the tech world, I fully understand unpaid internships at brand new companies with absolutely no money. What I don't understand is unpaid internships at PayPal. That's where I draw the line. But yes, when it comes to either working for free or doing nothing, most (rational) students will choose to work for free.
