As someone who deals with new co-ops (like interns) every quarter, the advice I can give you is to always ask if you want more work, and to listen to the office chit chat about work. A few smart co-ops have spent time listening to us talk about a problem we were having but didn't have time to tackle. They went off and researched and came back with ideas and suggestions which we ultimately gave to them to implement. It got them noticed, and ultimately a job (maybe not just for that, but you know what I mean). Whatever you do, don't sit there quietly and intimidated/too afraid to ask questions. Those people never* get job offers.

$8/hr probably means you'll be doing a lot of grunt work ... that's the boring stuff you do so that you get to sit in meetings with the senior staff as they talk about new initiatives, plan out new projects, talk about architecture, etc ... the stuff that is actually useful. It's there that you can start putting up your hand and saying "oh, hey, I can take care of that for you..."

I know around here that co-ops aren't allowed in production, which limits their access to the some of the coolest stuff. however, they do get to spend a lot of time working in labs, testing things (new tech) that some of the more senior people would love to have the time to do. Take your time, be thorough, and take calculated risks.

Remember that pretty much anyone in a senior position has gone through the shit work to get to where they are, and they will take some pleasure in giving you some too. It's hard when you know you want to do cool stuff, but in a few years you'll be able to look back and be thankful for the time you spent doing the shit work, because ultimately the shit work is the foundation of most companies.

Enjoy!

* very rarely

I've blocked them for a few weeks, but I get random notifications still :S

Due to Farmvilles massive spamming, and my inability to make it stop telling me when my sisters/friends/coworkers have found a new cow, I've actually resorted to unfriending people who are farmville addicts. My "newsfeed" went from updates on my friends lives to 3/4 farmville useless announcements, making it effectively useless. I was tempted to install the app to see if I could filter them somehow, but ultimately said forget it.

It's fine if people want to play games, but frankly, the rest of the world doesn't care or need to know that you planted seeds. If I installed a facebook app that broadcasted every time I got a green drop in WoW I'm sure my friends wouldn't be too happy.

Add to this the Mafia wars spam, and these stupid little apps have made a mess out of what was once a useful tool for me to keep on top of my friends day to day and related silliness.

I've lately really gotten into using the password keeper on my BlackBerry, putting in various websites and so on. I like it because it's portable, as you switch devices it's backed up and moved, and I pretty much always have it with me. It doesn't integrate with software etc for me, but I'm now in the habit of just throwing new stuff in there. It's quite handy, and free.

The thing I thought of is what about things like cockroaches/termites/bees/ants/etc ... things we sometimes consider to be vermin. In a northern climate, winter is good at keeping these populations under control, but if you take away winter...

As a Canadian, I'm glad that I don't have to worry about roaches/termites like people further south do. Bring on the snow!

The answer is to to do both, not one or the other.

Give them free food while they work to develop their economy and infrastructure, then slowly turn off the "Free" as they manage to bring new sources of local food online. It's very hard for people to build a road when they're starving, or sick with something that could be treated easily with $2 of medicine. Once the roads are built, and irrigation ditches dug, they can start farming and providing for themselves, and the aid then turns off slowly, or is shifted to more advanced aid. Instead of helping with irrigation and roads and farms and healthcare, start building schools, factories, putting more people to work. that will increase the ability for people to support themselves, and help develop spinoff industry (who's going to fix the tractors on that new farm? who's going to teach? etc).

I agree with your sentiment, but I think there needs to be an initial helping hand while the markets etc develop.

As a DNS admin myself, touching high value zones, let me tell you, missing a stupid dot happens all the time. All the change control in the world doesn't help when you just don't type one little period. Even more helpfully, most tools won't notice and the zone will pass a configuration check because missing the trailing "." is syntactically correct.

Let me add as well that "change management" that you want is just fantastic .. no making changes during core hours. When you run a 24/7 business, non-core hours means something like 2am. at 2am, I, and most mammals, are not at their mental best, so missing a single dot isn't horribly hard.

The only thing I'd suggest they do is use an offline test box for zones, then promote that change to prod. Then, you can load all the mistakes you want, do your digs, and if stuff works, THEN you move it to prod. I never ever make changes on production servers, they are done offline, tested, then put into prod with scripts. It makes it a lot harder for missing periods to make it into production.

Finally, this is a good reason why negative caching should have low TTLs. If you run a DNS server that can't handle low neg-caching TTLs, it's time to upgrade from a 386.

Cheers.

To further add to this point, if there's one lesson I could pass on to everyone entering highschool or stuck in it, it's that highschool doesn't matter. At all. The day you graduate an walk out may well be the last time you ever see anyone from your highschool. It has so little impact on your life, unless you want it to, that it makes it easy to look back and laugh at the things you thought were important.

Educationally, there is more impact, but even then, I don't remember the last time I read a book and wrote a report about it, or used my OAC Physics/Math. The skills I do use on a daily basis are the ones I learned in tech classes, and in music class/bands. Learning to collaborate, invent and create within a framework is pretty much what I do day in day out.

Life begins after highschool .. it's just a blip along the way. The friends you make after highschool (in college, etc) are the ones that you'll keep for life (most likely.)

As someone levelling their 5th toon, I can say, I love the changes. I am sick and tired of the Barrens, and anything that can get me up to the higher levels faster is going to allow me to keep playing and enjoying the game. The first 2 times I levelled, I did all the quests, got into the lore, etc, but you know what, it's no different the 3rd, 4th, 5th, xth time. If it wasn't for the L2P value of spending hours with a new class, I'd say Blizz should just allow you to start a new toon at level 58 like the DK's, so you can miss all the old world runaround.

Sure, it's annoying to know how much money I've paid for mounts, and how much time I spent on autorun in the old world, but thats the nature of things, they change. I just wish they'd change more, so that maybe levelling other toons wouldn't be the boreing grindfest it is now... cuz I'd really like to try playing a warlock.

I am completely with you. I find that after a long taxing day at work, where I've had to be creative, political, stressed, friendly, polite and logical, all I really want to do is go home and play a game where I don't necessarily need to use any of those skills any longer. However, on a normal day at work, I don't have nearly the drive to go home and turn off my brain. Instead I'll read something that challenges/intruiges me, watch discovery/food network to get my brain going, cook something new/different, take on a home renovation type task, etc.

I think we adapt our extra-work environment to counter our intra-work environment. Thats not to say that work should be the center of our lives, and we need to make things revolve around it, but when you spend 1/3 of your life working, it becomes a significant part of things, and the rest of your life changes as your role changes at work.

For example, in my last job, I didn't have much challenge or creativity, but tonnes and tonnes of stress. End result - drinking every night to relieve the stress. Leave that job, and I haven't touched my scotch collection in months, but my gaming/book reading has gone up.

One that I've always fallen back on when "do you have any questions for us?" time comes up is something along the lines of "Can you describe a typical day in the life of someone doing my job?". If they're honest, it generally gives me a feel for a typical day, how much time is spent in meetings, doing documentation, when people come in/leave, etc. I then lead them through things like "how much time do I spend doing change tickets/incident tickets? How much time is spent dealing with email/phone calls/walkups? How much time is spent on call?"

While these questions won't generally alter opinion of the job, it does tell me much more about the "how" as opposed to the general interview "what" and "why". Ultimately the quality of life part of the job is more important than the work, at least, as I grow older and move to more senior (ie: non-helpdesk/NOC) positions. Not hating being at work, being fufilled, challenged and treated with respect is more important at this point than simply advancing or resume building. To find out about the "quality of life" is generally the bent of my questions.

Good searching!

I find, as do others I work with, that the little one-off, "micro meetings" held around the office every day are very useful. Instead of getting the X people needed to make a decision into a scheduled room, grab them and stand in front of a white board (or whatever) in an ad-hoc fashion. Or, as we do, we all turn around in our chairs, discuss what needs doing, and get back to work in a matter of seconds/minutes, instead of scheduling a full meeting.

I feel like when a meeting is scheduled, the time leading up to the meeting is seldom useful (oh, meeting in 15 minutes, better start slowing down/not start any more work), then the time after the meeting loses some function as there is the inevitable discussion of what we talked about, the creation of minutes, followup emails, etc. On a somewhat similar note, booking a meeting for a 1/2 hour instead of an hour forces people to work faster, and cuts down some of the wasted chit chat time.

We just moved into a new office here, and it has a large number of meeting rooms, which is great. But, even better, there are quite a few "break out" areas, with chairs and a white board, but no door, and no reservations. So when you need to get a couple peoples ideas, you steal a breakout room, and whiteboard what you need. Use your mobile to take a picture of the whiteboard, erase, and move on to the next task. Plus, these meetings tend to be over quicker.

Another trick I've learned .. if you get invited to a meeting, and you don't really feel like you need to be there, just decline it. If the meeting organizer really wants you there, they'll invite you agian, or call up/email and say "oh, we'd really like you there". but it saves you from sitting through a meeting where you just zone out and waste an hour.

Overall, there is great value in meetings, but only if they are kept to the time required to resolve whatever you're there for, and only if they pertain to everyone there. It's pointless to invite 2 different groups to a meeting, so one has to listen to the other talk and be bored, then switch. Focus on goals, invite only the people who need to be there, and get back to work.

I'm sure this must be a relief to George Carlin .. he must be the happiest man on ...

what?

Dead you say?

Well, at least his legacy lives on.

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, CockSucker, MotherFucker, and Tits

I feel better already.

I'm simply pasting a comment I made on a similar article a couple years back ... with further support for people with management skills - too often the most technical person is put into the teamlead/mangement position, and they have 0 clue how to deal with people, and those people are HORRIBLE managers. I'd take a technically clueless manager any day over a technically skilled one with no management skills.

Pasted comment (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=160072&cid=13401906):

I have a manager thats HIGHLY technical, but his management skills suck. He's a YES man to every other department because he doesn't have any balls. He won't back us up and if you go into a meeting with him, you know you're in trouble. He doesn't do evaluations and unless you're asking him a technical question, won't make a decisive answer.

I think I'd rather have your boss ... you don't necessarily need to be highly technical to be a good manager, but if you're a shitty manager you're stuck. Technical skills can be learned, but good people skills are hard to come by.

I dunno ... I guess it's a toss up. My bosses boss is a great manager, but HIGHLY untechnical. Has a hard time shutting down her computer. It's annoying, sure, having to explain things twice, but at least we can trust her to manage stuff and cover our backs and get stuff done.

Having worked in a very open company, which devolved into a restrictive one like you describe (books of rules) I can tell you exactly why they have books: because they need them.

There is always someone trying to game the system, someone looking for a loophole, an out, a way to abuse, steal, harass, annoy, slack, avoid and so on. So rules have to be made because one idiot decided to try and use $LOOPHOLE to get out of $WORK_BEING_PAID_FOR.

Add to that a union, and you've got a recipe for pages and pages of very specific rules.

For example, in that company, there was a rule: no tank tops. By common consensus, that meant no shirts without sleeves. But some would take that too far, and wear shirts that had very tiny sleeves, then claim, "its not a tank top". So they had to implement a rule that said "sleeves must be longer than 3" from the shoulder", but then someone argued about where the shoulder started, so they had to make an even MORE specific rule about the distance from the neck to the shoulder.

In short, there's one in every crowd. And that one ruins it for everyone else, in small, death-by-a-thousand-papercuts ways.