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jhrrsn

Re:Career Advice from Scott Adams (2007) on Thursday January 07, 2016 @05:54AM (#10857222)
On the whole, I think I agree with Scott's advice in this post. However, there are some real challenges that come with the choice to be 'good at a few things' instead of the 'best at one thing. Namely, if you're not starting your own business, I think it massively reduces your employment mobility.

I am fortunate in that I am valued within my organisation for my 'generalist' spread of skills (including communication, development, analysis & sales). It's clear to me how useful it is to be able to approach a problem from several angles and engage with specialists from different areas effectively.

However, if I ever want to move out of my current organisation, I feel as though I would end up taking a significant step backwards in my career because almost all advertised jobs are specialised roles.

This creates a constant pressure in my mind to specialise and focus more on a single area.

Yes, but I believe in a society where almost all of the major news outlets are owned by supporters of the current government, the politicians also have a strong ability to control what their voters are demanding.
Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:20PM (#10465325)
AppleCare extends the product warranty for an additional year, but outside of an Apple Store (where they register the machine for you in-store) you are simply buying a warranty in a box. It's a failing of the staff that sold the warranty for not making this clear to the purchaser.
Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:17PM (#10465293)
Over the course of my professional life with laptops, I've used Apple, Alienware, Dell and Lenovo machines. I can safely say that the three-day turnaround in an actual bricks & mortar store offered by Apple is far and away the best service I've ever received (the worst being a two-week wait that didn't resolve the issue!).

Regarding the business-level support, I think it's fair enough for the store to deliver a baseline level of support to consumers for free and a paid-for service for people who need priority and/or loaner machines to cover the repair period. I personally don't think that yelling at managers should result in priority over other people in the queue.

I think the main issue here is that because Apple integrate their batteries like they do, it's not possible to perform what was once a simple repair yourself. I'm personally okay with that, because the outstanding battery life on my MacBook Pro is a boon almost every single day.

Re:Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses on Monday January 19, 2015 @06:41AM (#8911449)
I've found that if you have authoritative addressing data for your target market(s), a search/autocomplete field is a great alternative to the multi-field form being talked about in this discussion. Having access to that sort of data is, of course, a pretty big caveat as much of it is currently proprietary but efforts are being made globally to address (couldn't resist!) this (e.g. http://openaddresses.io, http://alpha.openaddressesuk.org).
Re:Poll: Are you moving to the Amazon Fire Phone? on Monday June 23, 2014 @04:22AM (#7930798)
I've been doing this for a while and, while it infuriates some people, I've found it to be very freeing. Mailbox is a great way of dealing with email, and Do Not Disturb lets me allow certain important calls through if I need to. I enjoy the feeling of being in control of my phone, rather than at its mercy!
Re:Facebook acquires Oculus VR on Tuesday March 25, 2014 @05:47PM (#7469297)
This, absolutely this. I just can't comprehend why anyone with such a great buzz around their fledgling product would get into bed with FB, dooming their work to ad-riddled nonsense.