Sort of like Rural America is strategically ignored by the main players for Internet Access. Best play so far is Verizon...so long as you're nearby a primary corridor for LTE, that is. Otherwise, you get the dubious joy of Satellite Fraudband, 2/3G, or dialup. To put it in would be only as a loss leader play because the overall expense of putting in tower coverage versus payback unless you're talking a highway corridor is a bad picture in the bean counter sense of things. It's a dead loss. I very strongly suspect the same story for Mexico out around the area they're doing this...so, strategically, they ignore them.

They NEVER read TFA. Ever.

Either that or manipulate things via subterfuge...

And, if you've not figured out what I'm trying to tell you, my answer in your example would be, "Unless you want to spend two more million and spend 12 more months in development, and COMMIT to that- no."

The idiot notion of not being "negative" is fantasy that some crazy HR people came up with to whitewash over the real problems going on in a given company. You need to not just simply say, "no", but in the same vein, trying to not say no is stupid, crazy, etc. Sometimes things ***ARE*** really negative things and you can't wish/will them any other way.

Sadly, the JIT model is the only way to work in a mess like that...followed up with plans to vote with your feet.

The problem with that particular notion ("Yes, but you'd need to spend...") is that they're oftentimes NOT savvy enough to grok where you're coming from and they'll just hear the "yes" and make you try to jam 18+ months of dev effort into 6-8 months with the typical, classical, predictable failures, in spite of explanations why it just won't work with their notion. They hear "yes" followed by "wah...wah-wah...wah-wah-wah" like on Peanuts animated features when the adults talked. The "yes" means to them it's doable- the rest is irrelevant details as far as they're concerned (And, YES, I've dealt with the kind all too often and quite a bit in the last two and a half years, much to my chagrin...)

If "yes" is part of the answer when it probably ought to be a "no" or a qualified "no", then it's the wrong answer many times. Seriously. Any notions, from HR or otherwise that doesn't allow for a "no" answer from anyone other than executive management is a recipe for disaster.

They saw the cookie-cutter AS degree and passed on him. Not broad-based enough. Probably in a downturn.

Both items are deal-breakers when you're dealing with someone with the levels of experience that were available during the latter condition. (Why get a fresh AS grad, when you can get an SME for roughly the same price? Mainly because the SME's desperate...)

Yeah, you're technically old-school. You were taught a discipline- which, in truth, is little different than learning a trade, to be bluntly honest.

Colleges have lost their way...or worse, they've taken to strip-mining students for all the cash they can bleed from them and the government through student loans.

How many of them are doing embedded Linux and Android projects- and when they weren't, how many of them were using ThreadX, VxWorks, pSOS, Lynx, QNX, etc.?

If you needed to know VS, you were working in the wrong circles. I didn't need to know VS even though it was one of the bigger deals for doing Windows development- I knew how to code C++ and understood and used ATL, MFC, etc. Which, by the way, is the way everyone should've framed it. Not, "do you do VS"?

Which is pathetic for the CC, honestly. Python's doable because it's *free* just like Java was then- and worse, you didn't need VS to do C++...

Dev C++
With MinGW or Cygwin, Eclipse

Sure, it didn't have some of the glitzy stuff MS was shovelling- but you could have pretty much done Windows or Cross-Platform C++ development back when Java was the big rage at the Community Colleges. And this doesn't even get into them doing Linux for all of it, including Java, Python, etc... They're guilty of some of the same mentality that spawned the notion that these idiot "bootcamps" are a good substitute for a discipline or vocational education. The problem isn't quite the thing Mike Rowe's fingering on this- but he's close enough to not disagree at all. They're guilty of trying to strip-mine all the students for all the money they can. Actually teach something? That's too much into our "BoM" on those grads we're pumping out.

Part of the reason you had problems getting a gig was that they saw the "cookie-cutter" Associate's degree and passed on that. You've nothing to offer except coding for them at that stage, regardless of whether that's true or not- because that's the only metric they've got to go off of. If you actually have ability and can pick up the Engineer's trade, you should get the rest of the BS degree you should get (which won't assure you the job...little will, honestly, unless you've got 2-3 decades of the bleeding edge, self-taught through the school of hard knocks...but it'll HELP, all the same...) and work on teaching yourself any gaps in anything they didn't teach you on your own. There's always something that they won't/don't teach you. You have to learn it on your own. Whether it's C++, OOD/OOA, or the like, you're going to have to be able to grab the ring yourself repeatedly to keep employed. The reason they passed on you is the AS degree- because of the "pathetic" I opined on at the beginning. They're not teaching a trade. They're honestly not teaching a good base to work with at most Community Colleges these days. They're teaching you the in-vogue stuff right then (You shouldn't be learning VS, you should be learning C++ which doesn't really and honestly give a tinker's damn where it's being implemented if you've done it right... You shouldn't be learning Java just because the College is too cheap to get proper Windows tools (which, again, is PATHETIC because the tools have been "there" within reach for nearly 20 years...). You shouldn't be learning Python because that's the big main big-deal in dynamic content websites in there with Java and PHP... You get the idea...) In all honesty, it wouldn't endear you to me if I were to hire help with either my Game Porting interest or my Agritech one. In the former, I'd need a self-starter that understands C and C++. They'd need to be adaptable to pick up Lua if they didn't already know it. They'd have to be able to debug code on X86, ARM, and MIPS. The requirements for the Agritech business I'm starting...are similar in nature, along with "getting" embedded coding. That's the kinds of jobs there's currently work for that's sustainable. An Associate's isn't going to help you there unless you can show you putz with that stuff already and can prove you might grow to fill those shoes in a 6-18 month timeframe being allowed to do it. The same goes for a "bootcamp".

And, unless they were wired to move on to other things, either on their own or by way of a proper (mind...) college education, they'll be technically obsolescent in 3-5 years.

Bootcamps are useful for teaching you some new buzzword skill, but they're not the same thing as properly learning a trade or a discipline- they're only truthfully useful for quickly picking up a new set of tools for the trade.

I wouldn't put mine to the curb because I'm still playing game titles on the console. Having said this, the world being awash in $100 and less boxes that do a better job of Netflix (AND the others...), it's also awash with devices that with a decent BT game controller or similar can manage just shy of the PS3 titles as well.

It's not a wise move on their part. Google's going to eat their lunch if they do this.

It's still a hack and a workaround there. Just because it works "okay" and it's "easy" doesn't mean the yanking of the functionality in the PS4 isn't problematic. I know I'm waiting for a critical mass of PS4 titles before I contemplate a move- and with GoogleTV or an Android HDMI stick, it became stupidly easy to do the others. It's another box, but still- Sony's not getting me to sign off on this crap and at the rate they're going I might just give the PS4 a pass as well.

There is a reason I am keen on seeing if Valve can manage something with SteamBox/SteamOS/Linux. I'm a bit tired of the BS and lies about this stuff.

The problem with USB MSD is that you can't operate against the store with the OS on the device at the same time the Host OS is doing it. MTP was chosen so that you could do things on the store while the device was able to use it at the same time. The fact that the implementation of the whole notion's flawed (Hey, Microsoft came up with it!) in the manner that it's single threaded (You can only act on a single object request at a given time), is irrelevant to everything. Now, if they could come up with a 2.0 that was multithreaded, and have proper USB IF compliant implementations of the same (MTP is an IF spec, mind...) then it'd be great. You need SOMETHING like it in place- just not what we've got in it's current form.