shrub
Here is an interesting thought for the discussion: in fact, the more highly skilled women I see in tech, the less I feel I should be in this field unless I am as good as them, which I simply am not. If there were more average chicks doing average tech things, I would feel much better - but as it is, I feel like I need to be some sort of super women who speaks on a panel in order to fit in.
I disagree with this and am inclined to take offence. Programming is not at all like following a simple recipe. Perhaps if the chef specifies that the line cooks must raise special chickens to be slaughtered for the main dish, keeps a herb garden that the line cooks have to maintain, puts the line cooks in charge of estimating and purchasing ingredients, and gets them to experiment with genetically engineering food to taste good in the dish, maybe then there is hope for a comparison.
Why don't we display dates as seconds since epoch? Because people don't recognize that format.
For technical purposes, use a date format with technical advantages (YYYYMMDD). For displaying the date for the user, format it so people can understand it (ex. January 10th, 2013) - and localize it if you have that information, or allow customization, or it all else fails, provide and explanation.
I guess if I tried to do a start-up, it would surely fail as I stare bleary eyed into my drawer of shirts, having just been distracted from the most important idea I've ever had.
... time to see if I can hack it, I guess.
From the other side, though, I have a new niece, and my desire to shower her with gifts and things is something I struggle with. Any time I see something cute, I just want to buy it for her. I have to stop and remind myself that she's got plenty of stuff already.
It seems like a difficult thing to balance.
Sometimes it's not just a matter of being intrinsically motivated, and no matter what you sacrifice, you never seem to have enough.
"Many young people, who have the ability to attend post secondary institutions, will not get that opportunity because of limited family financial resources." - http://rotarycs.org/local.aspx
This is my anecdotal story. Not only did I fit into that category, I was also not initially intrinsically motivated. But the good people at the Rotary Club accessed my high risk of dropping out and gave me a "Stay in School" scholarship.
Having people believe in me and put $5000 on it - well, I can't say enough good things about them. I believe I would have given up on school in grade 7 (and I still missed a large chunk of it (long story)), but instead here I am with a BSc in Computer Science with "Great Distinction" instead. I imagine I would still be a min-wage Courtesy Clerk at the local IGA if I hadn't been given this opportunity.
Part of the trouble is that only 3 of these scholarships were given out when there were plenty of other kids who could have used them too. Not necessarily hand outs, but a hand up. These scholarships come with mentoring and support to develop motivation in the student to not only stay in school, but to do well at it.
It's not that I think they owe me a scholarship and mentoring, but just that it's not really my fault I was born in to a situation where I would have otherwise had virtually no idea and no means of escaping. I suppose maybe I could have tried worked for it all by myself and for myself (and I did pay for the rest of my schooling myself), but I can't imagine how I would have known to without intervention and I'm not sure I wouldn't have worked myself to death before getting anywhere.
I wish I had more profound and coherent things to say about this, but it's a subject that is pretty close to home and I could start rambling pretty quick.
I actually spent more than an hour on the phone with some of the call-you-up-because-you've-won-something-but-you-can't-have-it-unless-you-give-us-money scams once. I repeatedly gave them a bogus credit card number and insisted it ought to work. I got passed from person to person and was asked with varying degrees of politeness and barely suppressed aggravation to repeat the number backwards and forwards, and was I sure it hadn't expired, and did I possibly have another credit card, etc.. I was very polite and cheerful, agreeing graciously with every request to be put on hold or transferred. Hold times are great to get the giggles under control.
When the last guy they transferred to me asked if I was toying with them (I'm pretty sure I covered my giggle with a decent enough cough, but maybe not), I asked him if I could phone my bank to find out what the problem was and call him back. Out of the question, of course. I asked if I could check with my bank and if they'd please call me back in 10 minutes. He agreed, but I never called my bank and he never called back.
What I wish I had got in there somewhere was something like "it really ought to work, I used it yesterday to pay for postage on a parcel from Nigeria."
I would like to add a source or two of grumpiness.
To the "Work cross-functionally" section: it is possible to be injected into the creative process too early and too far. I may be creative, but I am not a replacement for a designer or graphics artist. I can sketch a wire frame, but I get really grumpy when someone says "now we want a screenshot of what it would look like in the real website."
Also a source of grumpiness is being expected to know everything about computers and be able to do/fix anything. As a programmer, if I say I can't administer a production level server, I hope that will be respected and someone qualified will be found to take care of the task.
I know there are really talented people with a wealth of cross domain knowledge and expertise, but for me - I'm a programmer, Jim, not a graphics artist or a system administrator.
I have to admit though that this scheme has arisen largely from shopping at thrift stores (not that I probably couldn't afford new clothing, but it remains a thrifty habit from a tight-budgeted youth). I enjoy the hunt for an outfit, but when I find one, I don't have the option of just buying 10 because generally the items are one of a kind in the store. Overall it works for me: interesting clothes, fun finding them, uncomplicated mornings, low budget.
On the other hand, when she doesn't call me for help, she ends up printing off a picture from a webpage and scanning it back in to get it into a power point presentation. That's better than giving up on the problem, I guess.
I can easily live with two, but there was a spare old monitor kicking about, so I absconded with it. With only one monitor, I spend a lot of clicking through the task bar trying to figure out what window I need next. With lots of monitors, I'm able to remain focused by just glancing back and forth between monitors.
No matter how many times I explain or quote higher or tell them the feature creep is becoming unreasonable (oh by the way, we have 18 products with complicated interactions, not the 3 we asked for on the quote, but we expect to still pay the same), such that I can't possibly write it all and test it all, they just don't listen and they leave me holding the bag. So, while I'd like to do testing, just getting the thing kind-of working isn't in the budget, never mind getting it working well.
Sorry for the rant and... come to think of it, it may be time for a new job.
1. Keeping any one finger extended while keeping the rest off the screen is none to pleasant for me, whereas mice are pretty comfy to rest the hand on.
2. Being a female with somewhat longer nails, I find using touch pads and touch screens to be a nightmare in terms of accuracy. I know exactly where my mouse is and what it's going to activate when I click - I can't say the same for my finger nail getting in the way or the larger area of finger-pad that touches as a result of avoiding nail contact. I suppose this could be remedied with a stylus of some sort, but I'm also sad when my hand is in the way of viewing stuff around what I'm trying to manipulate. I've got some pretty slender hands, but this still leads to awkward wrist action trying to keep a finger on the screen and look at everything around it simultaneously.
3. The distance I cover with my mouse on the desk in order to move my pointer across three monitors is a fraction of the actual distance travelled by my pointer, so instead of sweeping my arm dramatically across a meter or so, I've flicked my wrist a few cm to achieve the same effect. But, when I move my mouse very slowly, I can still achieve pixel accuracy.
4. Unless screens develop the ability to change their texture and structure, there is just no screen substitute for the little grooves between the keys, home row extrusions, and physical feedback of my keyboard. I can rest my hands on the keyboard without worry because it takes a certain amount of pressure to activate the keys, and I know for certain when I have pushed a key, even if there is no immediate visual feedback. I can always look down to my keyboard and it reveals a good deal of it's functionality to me. It also never takes up any precious screen real estate and I don't have to do anything elaborate to bring it up.
5. Goodness, can you imagine how dirty my screens would get, so fast! Yuck. Finger prints and smudges everywhere. But this is just my opinion and may be subject to change if better technologies come around. Presently I'm in no hurry to abandon my mouse & keyboard.
-edit for formatting.
Drinking tea is part of the culture of my family, so I started drinking it at a very young age (as soon as I could hold a cup?) with 3/4 milk and 1/4 tea. As I got older, the amount of tea increased until there was no milk left. These days, whoever I visit, it seems I can always count on being offered a cup of tea.
When I started having all sorts of issues sleeping at a young age, it just didn't occur to me or anyone that it could be the copious amounts of tea. Doctors ran tests on my blood numerous times and didn't find anything. They asked me all sorts of questions (even if I was pregnant at the tender age of 15, which shocked young innocent me), but caffeine never came up. Strangely, sending me to bed earlier resulted in tossing and turning even longer into the wee hours of the morning. Sleeping pills just resulted in feeling strangely dazed, but still not sleeping.
These days I have stopped drinking tea/caffeine after a certain hour in hopes of getting more sleep, but I still drink a cup of coffee in the morning and I still have troubles getting to sleep (takes a couple of hours no matter hour exhausted I feel). Maybe it's time to cut out the caffeine completely.
When I first worked there, training was 3 weeks. For a lot of new hires, 3 weeks is just not enough time to learn how to use a computer, how the internet works, and what the Comcast service offerings are in each area. Sure, they could pass the wussy multiple-choice "progress evaluations", but that's a far cry from having a workable knowledge of computers, internet infrastructure, etc.. A lot of them barely knew how to look something up in the knowledge base (internal website), and when they did find something, it was likely to be horribly out of date.
When I first graduated to "the floor" from training (and for a long time after), I kept all my class notes in a tabulated binder and referred to it often. This was entirely optional, and a lot of less capable classmates came with nothing but their password sheets. I bet Comcast spent an awful lot on technician visits because of CAEs who didn't know how to release/renew an IP address and subs who refused to pay $50 when the person on the phone had assured them it was not their computer's fault, thus the visit was free.
Eventually someone decided they could make up for general incompetence by introducing software that enforced a specific trouble-shooting procedure. They hoped that questions like "Is the customer's TV working? yes/no" would save time for the CAEs who always insisted it was antivirus causing the problem, whether or not the sub reported a poll down across the street; and questions like "Is the customer's computer turned on (yes/no)" would help the CAEs who insisted it was always a Comcast outage requiring a special technician escalation, regardless of the sub having reported no lights on the computer in addition to no lights on the modem. It's a great idea in theory, except in practice the software was buggy ("I'm sorry, can I put you on hold for 2 minutes? My trouble shooting software just crashed..."), sometimes lead in circles ("Can I get you to check... wait, no. We already did that. What the..."), and when it finally went full-scale and started accumulating hundreds of thousands of tickets, it became slower than slow ("Sorry, I'm just waiting for the next step to come up."). Since the policy for a while was that every call absolutely required a TTS ticket number (only retrieved upon "completing" a line of questioning), we actually had times when we'd say "I'm sorry I can't help you right now, we're having a tool outage," and there were many times I'd just click the shortest path to a ticket number because the system's bias was that the both the customer and the CAE were idiots; it was never the fault of, say, ancient terrible infrastructure that was falling apart.
The process of escalating a call in that center, by the way, was to put the customer on hold, stand up and wave your hand in the air. You'd then hope that someone would notice you before you lost all feeling in your arm. If someone did happen to see you (before "ops" called your phone to chide you on your excessive hold time), they'd ask what the situation was and would then usually refuse to take the call. "I'm going to say the same thing as you told them, deal with it." So the CAE has two options, drop the call and get fired or repeat that to the customer. Eventually we'd try to avoid having call time impacted by waiting for a "manager" to refuse to help anyways. For one particularly bad shift I worked out a deal with the guy sitting next to me: I just passed him my headset. He didn't even have to lie and say he was a manager, just the change of voice turned the trick.
When I left they had shortened training to 2 weeks. The last guy I partnered with for his last day of training (live calls) could not tell the modem from the router (I got the impression he wasn't sure what a router was, actually).
The whole thing was terrible for customers and for people who actually wanted to help customers.