The problem is that if it wasn't for PCs, I'd have never gotten into IT. My 19-year-old female self realized that if I couldn't repair my own PC I'd be dependent on other people for the rest of my life every time something went wrong. (Like I am with my car *cough*) My video card blowing out is what started me down the rabbit hole to begin with.

Most local schools are funded primarily at the county or state level, not the federal level. The tax that supplies our district's funding is our property taxes. So they got a double whammy with the foreclosure crisis - property values and thus taxes went down, and there were fewer homeowners paying taxes at all.

I wouldn't mind doing this, but I would like to eat too.

It depends on the school and location. Some public schools in the US are great. Most are mediocre. Some are terrible. Same thing applies to our universities - some are great, most are average, and the rest are for-profit.

There's also the fact that a lot of foreign applicants completely fabricate their credentials, with the full buy-in from the institutions that churned out their degrees. So while there will be some applicants who graduated from top tier schools, there will also be a lot who graduated from the equivalent of DeVry who have fantastic resumes that are full of BS. And you won't find that out until long after you've hired him.

I wonder if this practice is also influencing the "requirements bloating" that happens in HR departments. Fake resumes get turned in that have all these fabulous sounding things, so they plop them into the job requirements - if some resumes have them, that means some applicants should have them too! Next thing you know they want someone with 10 years experience with Ruby on Rails.

Even if the accent isn't a problem, sometimes cultural biases can make communication rough. I once spent a two hour long meeting going in circles with someone who'd lived in the US for a decade now and spoke nearly flawless English, but who entirely failed to grasp the concept of what we were supposed to be discussing. We needed X, he assumed we needed Y, and it was only at the end that we finally convinced him to give us the X we'd asked for in the beginning.

Where did I say I was documenting problems? We've got a ticketing system for that. (Which is also going to send a dozen email blasts per incident.) I was talking about plans and project status updates. Some things won't require immediate fixes, but we still want to make sure everyone is aware it's coming up.

I just don't bother reading my work email if I'm on vacation. If it's a serious enough problem they can call me on the work phone.

They aren't things I expect them to handle when they get back. It's more along the lines of "X broke while you were gone. We did Y to fix it. Here's the status on Y." Otherwise, they're going to encounter Y a month from now and go "wtf is this Y thing?" and we'll have to explain that Y happened while they were skiing in the Swiss Alps but we didn't bother CCing them on the plans for it.

Email's strength is that it is asynchronous. I send CC emails to people that I know are not available because I want them to read it when they get back, so they aren't totally clueless as to what happened while they were out scuba diving or whatever.

I actually have to do just that a lot of the time. Also, music helps a bunch - background noise that isn't random allows me to keep my mind on the task at hand instead of bouncing all over the place.

We also a problem of celebrating the ability to multi-task as an adult, and yet getting on the case of any child who exhibits those abilities because they're not "focused" enough.

I can stay focused just fine (*flicks eyes to where Outlook just refreshed*) and concentrate for long periods of time (*glances outside - cute squirrel!*) and I can assure you my eyes stay glued firmly to the screen. (*twitches and changes tabs because the title bar just changed on one*)

It also ignores the real reason many students opt for online only classes, which is asynchronous learning. Prof answers emails in the morning, goes to a committee meeting. One student eats lunch at work and does the homework during the rbeak. Another student starts during the afternoon while her baby is asleep. Yet another one doesn't get to dig into the assignment until after he's returned from working in an area with no Internet access. Prof can answer all their emails and questions in the evening, grades assignments, and the cycle repeats day after day.

The problem is that isn't taught as part of most project management courses - sure, the theory is, but the actual HOW is something you have to learn on your own. And that's the hard part.

Microsoft won't and can't test all of the hundreds of thousands of applications out there. It's not a problem with the OS, it's a problem with the in-house apps that interaction with the OS or whatever component of it that Microsoft updated. For example, my company is finally going to Office 2013, and I've spent some quality time this week verifying that an application we build that reads Word doc templates and spits them out as PDFs didn't choke on Word 2013. There's no way Microsoft could have tested that application, because maybe 15 computers in the world have it installed.