The Whiteboard

user55340

10:02 PM

Mod types, (@WorldEngineer since he's in chatish), there's a flag for you. I'm not happy.

Robert Harvey

Link?

user55340

@RobertHarvey programmers.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/45555

user55340

Its the edit comment.

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Crap I got the Ohio treatment too..pfleh

user55340

Apparently trying to slip in "please up vote me" via non-comment mechanisms.

Jimmy Hoffa

10:09 PM

whoa whoa whoa wait a minute, I think this person might have actually gotten it perfect?

Robert Harvey

@MichaelT Seems like you took the right approach. A flag is not needed there, unless this suggested editor is doing a lot of that. I went ahead and removed the signature from the question.

Jimmy Hoffa

All they could do was make fun of them with "Just draw pictures when you don't know" but the person did and they drew relevant pictures throughout as well as getting it all correct (I think?)

oh nope, wyoming and montana are backwards

user55340

@RobertHarvey Its a "keep it on the radar" - the "please up vote me" makes me grumpy - especially when the OP can't. And when its snuck into a minor question change for the purpose of that communication?

Robert Harvey

Yeah, I get it.

user55340

Now just out of curiosity, I wonder how many suggested edits sneak in  style comments into the text because they aren't rendered in the markdown.

Jimmy Hoffa

10:15 PM

@MichaelT bet SEDE can find these

in fact I bet that could yield a really interesting query

Robert Harvey

quora.com/Particle-Physics/…

If the Higgs Boson is massless then theoretically it can travel multiples of c, however as a singularity in combining the electron and Higgs boson, we get a particle which exerts it's effects on light, does this purport that a human soul is a naked singularity?

Joe

I hit passed the 200 point mark.

@RobertHarvey why that?

Robert Harvey

@Joe Congratulations

Joe

@RobertHarvey Thanks. Now I can make meaningful contributions to onstartups too.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe You could if it wasn't closed (or about to be closed?)

user55340

10:23 PM

@Joe Did you read the bit above it?

Joe

@JimmyHoffa It's still open. I've racked up about 50 points on it. I really like helping people in startups.

@MichaelT No sorry I haven't. Let me do that.

user55340

its... not even wrong.

user20683

@Joe It's going to be closed.

user20683

Soon.

user55340

> We're still working with Dharmesh to make sure that a reboot of the topic is truly the best course of action to take. We're still rather certain that it is, but we want to make sure that we've explored all possibilities prior to doing so. We do sincerely apologize for the confusion that the delay has caused, we just want to make absolutely certain that we're proceeding in the best possible manner.

Joe

10:27 PM

@WorldEngineer I really hope they change their decision. Even if people don't come back, the community should be proactive in upvoting stuff.

Python room is quiet, JS room is locked, I'm definitely not going into Lounge.

Ampt

this is the place to be anyway

ya dingus

Joe

If any of you are American, can you explain what a "staffing solution" means? sigconsult.com

Ampt

they hire people for companies

head hunters

scum of the earth depending on who you ask

user55340

@Joe a key part of the success or failure of an SE site is the moderation part of the community moderation. One cannot leave it up the moderators alone.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe A staffing solution is when you create a solution that will give a bunch of people staff so they are all sick and out of the office never noticing that you're taking their money and providing negative value

Joe

10:30 PM

@MichaelT True, and I believe that there was a lot of effort put into making it work before.

user20683

@Joe I've already asked, there will be no reprieve. I believe they will try to relaunch it via Area 51.

user55340

@Joe You want to hire a director and pay then $200k / year and have certain requirements. Thus you contact a head hunter. Typical pay for the finders fee is 10% of yearly salary.

Ampt

Of particular note is that they aren't paid for finding a good candidate or even a qualified one

just finding one that you are dumb enough to say yes to

then they take their money and go on their merry way

Joe

Interesting way to describe themselves. The website is also very vague (to me).

Ampt

Thats on purpose

They carry the reputation of telemarketers

Joe

10:32 PM

@WorldEngineer That's bad news unfortunately.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe It's vague on purpose, people in American business circles like to lie a lot, it's a lot harder to be called a liar though if you're vague enough that nobody's really certain what you're talking about

user55340

Back in the early dot com boom days, you could get $10k or so selling the company phone directory to a head hunter... they'd cold call your engineers and offer them spots at companies for $250k/year (and even if one of them accepts, its a profit).

Ampt

250k a year? I need a new job

Robert Harvey

Are those legitimate offers, or are they bait and switch? Do you get there, only to find out that the position is really $70K per year?

Joe

Okay I found the part where they admit what they do. It says: "Each of our offices specializes in the recruitment of IT staffing professionals with critical, in-demand information technology skills." sigconsult.com/services/it-staffing

user55340

10:33 PM

Those were the boom days, in Silicon Valley.

user55340

@RobertHarvey If you had a pulse, you could get $70k easily.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe That doesn't even make since; that says they recruit recruiters

user41796

@RobertHarvey generally they are legit offers. And you'll see staffing companies specialize in various strata of the market.

user55340

(I was making $70k/year doing front line phone support at SGI)

Joe

Can recruiting be all that bad if you share a legitimate relationship with the person you are trying to place?

user55340

10:35 PM

@Joe It depends... there are multiple types of relationships. And realize that they were there for themselves.

user55340

There is the you give your resume to one of them, and they find a place for you. There is the you want to hire someone and they find them... or hire them away from another company.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe I would call "They called me and offered me a job, I never met them but they organized and interview for me and got 10% of my first years salary for themselves" much of a legitimate relationship

It's a relationship like a farmer has with a hog

user55340

I even saw one that was dedicated to startups back in the day. Someone had an idea, they got financing and hired a team for a startup (that had the goal of getting bought)

user55340

@JimmyHoffa I was more thinking pimp...

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT same thing in nebraska! Oooo!

Joe

10:37 PM

@MichaelT My suggestion is from a recruiters point of view. Say I am a recruiter that is connected to a group of individuals in a certain circle that want to be placed, can that type of person really be compared to a 'scum' recruiter?

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe that's not how it works

you have it backwards, the recruiter is associated with company's looking for people to hire

not the people getting hired

Joe

@JimmyHoffa Yeah that is the one people dislike I assume

user55340

The view is that recruiters are not producing value - they're parasites of the process of hiring.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe That's the only one there is, the other type you're talking about is called a consultancy

user55340

(or at least, that's one view... not all recruiters are that way)

user55340

10:39 PM

@JimmyHoffa The sales department of a consulting company...

Jimmy Hoffa

When someone has engineers and goes around trying to find them positions rather than having positions and going around trying to find engineers it's a consultancy employing the engineers and it's not the same kind of bad relationship (though many consultancies are rather bad as well)

@MichaelT aye, right

Joe

@MichaelT Let me do some research on the value of this industry. It must be worth something if people are still recruiters in the tech age.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe It's worth a ton to the recruiters, it's a negative value to the industry.

user55340

The thing is, the 'relationship' with either the company or the potential hire ends as soon as the potential hire is placed.

Jimmy Hoffa

they reduce the incomes of company's and employees and produce no value other than by finding employees which if the recruiting industry vanished in an instant, companies would start doing on their own.

user55340

10:41 PM

Its just a question of how easily the company can find people.

Jimmy Hoffa

The only reason companies don't do it on their own right now is laziness and bad managerial structures, which they would suffer and fix or go bust for but companies do that all the time so that wouldn't really make much difference.

Joe

They must be adding value by eliminating wasted HR time. I suppose they are like the manual version of a survey filter.

user55340

(btw, got an email from a couple of weeks ago... apparently my former employer went with a recruiter who spammed every person in at least the zip code who had 'java' in the linked in skills - was rather amusing... my old manager was rather embarrassed about it when I bumped into him at lunch)

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe They don't do the filtering for the HR though, remember because they don't care if the company get's a good employee they more often then not get unqualified people for the company further detracting from the company's bottom line. If the internal HR did the recruiting they would filter considerably more than the recruiters do.

Joe

@MichaelT Seems like they're using the same keyword filters

user55340

10:43 PM

The day after word of that email got back to them (they even sent the email to current employees of the company), the recruiter was dropped.

Joe

@JimmyHoffa Good point.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe which is another reason recruiters exist, they don't save time but they take liability. If HR recruits someone and they turn out terrible they might get blamed, so if they can just tell managers to all use external recruiters instead of them then HR will never get blamed so they have less risk to their daily job.

user55340

The recruiter has no interest in placing a good candidate. They're after getting a person hired. Doctoring resumes is not unheard of (I carried a spare back when I was in SV between jobs in case the recruiter had adjusted what I said - to make sure that expectations were clear).

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT Yeah, I always made sure to put my copy of my resume in front of anyone during interviews because if a recruiter was in play I knew they got some funky resume that could say who knows what.

user55340

"Oh, it says I have 5 years of Python on there? That's not accurate, here's my copy of the resume..."

user55340

10:46 PM

They were just after getting someone hired.

Joe

@JimmyHoffa Corporate structures are strange in a way. Mckinsey spams me with "innovations in the workplace" emails and one of those articles actually mentioned that allowing employees to make mistakes may be a good thing for innovation.

Which was interesting in any case.

user55340

The freedom to not worry about "it must be right" means the freedom to innovate too. Its the acceptance of risk, and risk is a key part of moving forward.

Joe

@MichaelT Or in the case of analysts, "measured risk"

Jimmy Hoffa

@MichaelT A lot of homework questions lately?

Jimmy Hoffa

11:06 PM

It's interesting how many new-user questions we get these days which are clearly SO questions asked by someone because they were looking online and ran into P.SE instead of SO and figured "Programmers! I'll ask my code question here, perfect!". Is a generally good sign for our google rankings that we beat out SO in that regard as often as we do.

oh my god, it's just a joke ^_^ — zinking 7 hours ago

@zinking If that's the case in the future please remember this isn't a forum, questions asked here are to be taken seriously. Opinions, discussions, and jokes are all off topic here. — Jimmy Hoffa 2 mins ago

Hope that didn't come off too rude, wasn't sure if he was aware that questions are supposed to be actual questions here

Yannis Rizos

@JimmyHoffa The proper response to that comment is: If it's a joke, why isn't it funny?

user20683

From the SQL book I'm reading: "The Null Value Test (IS NULL)"

user20683

well duh

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer There's a very tiny set of times you use IS in SQL (can't even think of any off hand other than IS NULL), so it isn't uncommon to forget or be confused by the fact that you don't do an equality check for null

You say duh now but 3 years from now you'll be meddling in a database and write WHERE [Column] <> NULL and then wonder why the query isn't working

Matt D

11:24 PM

i use IS in sql queries all the time

IS NOT NULL

for example

Jimmy Hoffa

@MattD So IS NULL, and IS NOT NULL, when else do you use IS though?

Matt D

thats pretty much it

ive never bothered to look for another use for IS

can i use it for other things?

IS AWESOME?

Jimmy Hoffa

@MattD Exactly, the null equality check is an odd edgecase, it's easy to forget and try using = or <> instead of IS because for all other equality checks you use = or <>. Though now that I think about it, do you do IS in front of BETWEEN(,) ?

Matt D

no

you go blah BETWEEN(,)

Jimmy Hoffa

Right that's what I thought, though I have to check everytime I use between still..

Joe

11:28 PM

I need to find some mentors now. Interesting project coming up.

user20683

@Joe Mentors in what?

Joe

@WorldEngineer For programmers that have gone past the 'noob' stage and need some guidance to get to the level you guys are on.

user20683

@Joe do it for a dozen years (in Hoffa's and MichaelT's cases)

user20683

more like 20 in the latter

Joe

@WorldEngineer I'll pass the link on to you guys. If you're interested, sign-up. If not, no worries.

Yannis Rizos

11:38 PM

About half of that is from completely pointless (but somewhat funny) answers.

Joe

@YannisRizos I was wondering how points are awarded in Politics questions.

Yannis Rizos

@Joe Heh, well played.

Joe

@YannisRizos is the situation in greece really as bleak as the media says it is?

user20683

@Joe People are purposely infecting themselves with HIV to get 700 euros a month in benefits.

user20683

from what I hear.

Joe

11:48 PM

@WorldEngineer Is that a real statement?

user20683

@Joe It was a statement by the WHO, apparently it's a typo.

user20683

enetenglish.gr/?i=news.en.politics&id=1640

Yannis Rizos

@Joe It'll get worse before it gets better. While WE's comment isn't true, the health system is crippled.

Joe

People are blaming socialism, I'm blaming the euro.

Jimmy Hoffa

@Joe I'm blaming clowns. Hey- clowns, what's with all that makeup? What are you guys hiding?? I think they're clearly up to something

Yannis Rizos

11:53 PM

I'm blaming myself. Returning to Greece from the UK about a dozen years ago didn't prove to be the best idea ever.

Joe

@JimmyHoffa Are you indirectly pointing out that you are also polarized by your own political system? :P

Matt D

ok question folks

user20683

@YannisRizos Have you considered moving back to the UK?

Jimmy Hoffa

@WorldEngineer Probably a lot easier said than done these days

Matt D

should one use Membership, or Identity for ASP.NET authentication

user20683

11:54 PM

@JimmyHoffa fair enough

Yannis Rizos

@WorldEngineer Nope. Deeply rooted now.

Joe

Islands in Greece must be on the cheap

Jimmy Hoffa

@YannisRizos just remember, if it ever get's too bad out there, Wyoming is huge, and for all intents and purposes lacks any government whatsoever. A lot safer than Greece sounds from the headlines... but then it's hard to imagine Greece in current or previous formats- just too foreign to me.

Wyoming isn't foreign to anybody, have you ever been alone in an empty room? That's what Wyoming's like.

Robert Harvey

cv-pls

0

Q: Ways to continue to grow better at development and high level design without spending your life coding?

So I'm about 5 years out of college and a competent enough programmer. I know all the basics code smells, importance of encapsulation, code reuse etc etc that a competent programmer must know, I can recognize classic design patterns and I am pretty decent at refactoring and cleaning up code. Ho...

design

0

Q: Cross-Platform Programming Language To Manipulate Video

Hoping you can help. I'm not sure which programming language I should use for my project. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! More details about my project... I need to build an application which will create a proprietary file that has numerous RGB values. The file will be used to drive LED...

programming-languages gui video

Joe

The greeks of today seem mild compared to their ancestors. Imagine dealing with Leonidis as the greek leader.

Robert Harvey

11:58 PM

-1

Q: Is application written from scratch in programming language has to be license?

There are so many programming language like PHP, Perl, Python, Java, C, C++ and many other. These programming language has some open source license. If i develop application from scratch which is not related the source modification of these languages. Is my application has to be open source licen...

programming-languages licensing

Jimmy Hoffa

@MattD ...huh? Are these things counter to eachother? I don't keep up with front-end shit, I did plenty of it in the past but I'm firmly a middle/back-end guy for some time now..

user20683

@Joe Leonidis? Imagine dealing with the Emperor Phokas.

Matt D

membership is old, identity is new

same shit different name

slightly different api

Joe

@RobertHarvey are you looking for people to answer those?

Jimmy Hoffa

@RobertHarvey Already did.

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