Clearly you have never been to the UCLA campus because, if you had, you would have known this isn't true in the least. You can walk all over that place.

The problem in LA is the culture. People believe they are to be seen in their automobiles and they buy or lease expensive cars and drive them ridiculously short distances for that sole reason (if there is another reason, please do share but nothing really makes sense).

I worked for a company based out of LA for 2.5 years and we were there often. One guy lived a 10 minute walk from the office but chose to drive each and every day. He didn't buy an M3 to have it sit in his garage, after all. Nope, it sat in the company's garage instead.

SMH.

I work in marketing analytics and, specifically, in measuring the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns at a customer level. Straight up click tracking is dead and this will do nothing which is purports as organizations begin moving away from siloed measurement of IMP -> CLK within single channels at an aggregate level and instead go down to the very granular cross-channel customer-level attribution.

If you really want to avoid detection and behavior tracking, I highly suggest you entirely disable cookies entirely (yes, I realize this is not worth it at all), otherwise you will not have accomplished what you had hoped.

They'll quickly star the marketing machine calling it Windows X and then they'll start calling it X Windows as they move to the Linux kernel.
They can also start calling all computers running Windows X/X Windows, X Boxes. So really, using 10 just makes everything fit with marketing better since the Windows brand is so last century.

LoB

For the first time since I started w/the iPhone (the 3G was my first one), I see absolutely nothing of value with this major release version which makes me want to upgrade to it.

I'll be paying $99 for the 5S and be happy w/it. Sorry but unnecessarily bigger sizes and a better camera is not worth $200+contract renewal.

I totally understand what they're doing and that's fine if they want to operate in that way. Its people just need to realize this and use the name and prestige its name on their resume brings when they hop to a smaller but potentially more enjoyable organization.

The IT world is certainly competitive; however, ALL companies should see the internal benefits to training employees and working to ensure they do not leave. Companies with the mindset you laid out above are doing themselves a double disservice by not training their employees and leveraging the benefits and immediate returns provided by investments in their human capital. In some fields and with some resources, professional development is seen as a bigger happiness motivator and retention tool than more salary.

What you have outlined above is a company which is not interested in its people and only its immediate bottom line and one where it's clear its people should move on regardless of payscale and internal short-term opportunity provided.

As someone who has repeatedly attended and presented at conferences in my field, I make it a point during negotiations for any new job to ensure these are funded fully but only if I am presenting; otherwise, I opt to share in the costs associated in attending with my employer.

Each and every company I have worked at in the past (and current) has a budget for training and professional development of its employees, some more than others; however, by making a case that I am giving back to a community of like-minded professionals and putting our name and brand out there during presentations, I have found this is an easy sell for companies for which I want to work.

I work extensively w/SAS and utilize a lot of the conference (SAS Global Forum/SUGI prior) materials in my day to day both for myself and our entire organization. By making it clear to my employers that I want to give back by presenting, I have opened organization's view on how the sharing of information benefits the business while benefiting the entire industry.

Make your determination and desires known when you sign on and, if that is not an option, make it clear to your management that you want to do the same thing. While I have received a variety of different types of pushback over the years for this view, they have all relented and ended up changing their world view when the benefits are presented as they are.

Conferences are not inexpensive (SAS Global Forum is usually around $3000 - $3500 for a single person encompassing travel, conference registration, lodging, meals, etc) but the ROI can be HUGE beyond that depending on the knowledge transfers that occur, the networking opportunities, and the new business development which I have seen from these conferences.

While I did not attend SASGF 2014 this year, it was solely due to my available time to develop a presentation topic, not because my company would not send me (this was my first missed attendance since I became involved in the SAS world) and I look forward to contributing to and learning from others in the future.

Best of luck.

I was here before it was Slashdot...

What are you talking about? You might not have like the ads, but we never lied about anything. Our service was super clear about how it worked. And for those who didn't like the redirection, it has always been possible to create an account and disable that part of the service.

We have been building a data privacy and data usage policy document that we plan to release soon.

One of the many, many reasons to turn off ads is that we had to share some potentially personally identifiable information with ad partners (indirectly when making ad requests, they would just see it in the ad request), so by turning off ads, our privacy / data policy will be a lot more clear and will not need to have weird "certain third parties for certain services" kind of language to address the advertising business.

We're waiting to turn off ads, we'll get the document cleaned up, and we'll publish it.

-David

Nope. Never.

We wouldn't make such a case for turning off ads if this was our business model going forward. You could visit our site and see how we make money. We sell security services. We never could have done it without first being a consumer service, but we're not selling your data. Come on.

-David

Nope. Never. We've never sold our data. We've never even used it for marketing purposes internally.

We've only ever made money from one of three things: Ads, selling individuals an ad-free version, and enterprise security services.

Today, most all of our revenue, and all of our growth, comes from selling enterprise security. If you work in IT, it's worth checking out to improve your security posture. There's a lot more to it than you might guess.

-David

For many reasons including:

There aren't many places that do not have Office installed. People are very familiar with it and even if they aren't, they can usually make their way around it in with only a little coaching.

Most companies use Excel for basic analysis, charting, and data delivery to non-technical report recipients.

Deliver a raw dataset and allow the end-user to pivot, chart, etc. It takes the strain off the analytics team for basic tasks and gives the end user the power to do what they want with the data. Tableau seat licenses aren't realistic for most companies and building some sort of analytics platform from scratch in your language of choice isn't always something you can do in the short term and provide more functionality with less training required.

I could go on, but that gives you a general idea.

In the work my team is responsible for, I look for culture fit above anything else. I took a guy with some internship work during his graduate schooling and turned him into what I consider a stellar programmer/analyst.

I'd concentrate on your programming skill and your business knowledge, if any. A lot of organizations are looking for report jockeys and/or true analysts and in that case, highlight your visualization and analysis ability first, programming second. What sort of experience did you have during your schooling that you believe makes you a good fit for an analytics role today?

We have sponsored before, but we/I prefer to hire those who don't require it first.

What I like to see are the following:

1. Statistics knowledge

2. Excel (pivots, charting, VBA, etc.)

3. SAS/R/SPSS (in order).

4. Unix shell scripting.

5. Some sort of data visualization tool usage (e.g. Tableu)

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We are currently looking for analysts and the market is tough. We take people from all walks: CS, social sciences, Stats/Math/Econ/Finance, etc. The Analytics market is continually growing and in desperate need of people who are competent until higher education catches up and starts putting people out with a good mix of CS, Stats, and Business knowledge.

Get into Analytics IMO, the pay is great and the work is pretty fun.