I am a bit nervous, as tomorrow I am due to Take the TOEFL test, again (planning to search for Master Degrees and Scholarships)
I took it some years ago, and did a great score IMO (113/120)
Don't know why I am nervous now though. TBH I didn't study much for this time, I have already 5 more years of knowing English and practicing it, plus surely I have more subjects to talk about or general knowledge to be able to respond more eloquent answers.
because of the way you've been beaten down by your current (and some previous) jobs - you've demonstrated that you have a good ability to learn, you just need to get back to the place where you believe that. The new job really will help in that regard but there are other things you can do to help yourself in the meantime. Every time you do something well or "get" something in your studies (either for the degree, for work or self-study) make a note of it.
Either use your phone's notes app or actual post-its, then every day take 5 mins to look over the last week or two's worth of achievements and remind yourself of them, "bad" experiences stick in the memory more (it's an evolutionary thing) so this will help you re-enforce the memories of the good ones. It'll take a while (think weeks or even months) but it will help train your brain to have a more balanced view of your abilities.
@Nofel if you find a particular set of instructions doesn't work for you for something - take five mins and clear your head (have a walk or something - get away from the screen) and come back and try a different set, there's so many tutorials and guides on the internet that you'll almost certainly be able to find one that "clicks" with you
oh and I'm munching on a tub of Cadbury Heroes as well - I helped one of the salespeople change a flat tire this morning so they got me them to say thanks :)
bt when I see functions, I am confused, the first bit
@TheSnarkKnight I like the book, it is really a task to go through a task and do it but like @motosubatsu said it is my past and current PM attitude who has given me such ideas
@motosubatsu it is like ur ninja at SQL and If u cannot do a certain task or do it in a quick turnaround then what
@Nofel funny you should mention that. We just hired someone a few months back who was way underskilled. I brought him up to speed. Why? Because he has a good attitude, is eager, and wants to learn.
@Nofel also, they did that with me prior to that. I agreed to 30/hr instead of 35 to get the position.
@Nofel As an old boss said to me, and I say now. "I would much rather hire someone missing a few skills with the right attitude. If you're weak in an area, I can teach you or send you to a class. If you've got a bad ethic/attitude, there is nothing I can do with you"
Tech skills can up taught and trained. Talent, drive, and attitude cannot.
I tell myself, look at urself back in 2011, u didn't know WordPress, I got fired after 2 months into the job
before that I had 3 yrs job in CSS and UX
so I made it my mission to learn WordPress and I did freelance, a lot of mistake and made a lot client annoyed but eventually I was so good at it
that I would get bonus for turnarounds from freelance clients, then got job here in uk
again I was go to person for WP, then lost it coz of discrimination, then recuiters screwed me and my passion for magento also screwed me loosing jobs one after anitger
then I had to give up on that and come back to my own UX and CSS
now 1 yr into it and I am a go to person for WordPress while my peer has refused to do it coz he knows I can beat him to it
@Nofel the secret about IT is that everyone is making it up as they go along. You're not unique. Don't put so much pressure on yourself. You need to be able to screw up from time to time or you won't learn.
@Nofel as @TheSnarkKnight said ""I would much rather hire someone missing a few skills with the right attitude. If you're weak in an area, I can teach you or send you to a class. If you've got a bad ethic/attitude, there is nothing I can do with you""
I'll take slightly weaker skills and know that I can help someone build on that rather than ninja and a bad fit any day of the week
@Nofel funny you should mention that.. I'm currently having a difficult time with some complex SQL.. yes it's taking me far longer than I thought it would but I know that if I keep plugging away I'll get there
@TheSnarkKnight @motosubatsu when I was given the test, I didn't new a feature used via terminal to run the app but they aseked for it and I got 3-4 premium membership, so I start going through, and in a few hours I was generating the app via terminal
and when I was asked in interview, how and what you did and wyy
I was explaining it like a pro like I knew this for ages
The senior dev said "I am very happy with what nofel told me"
I might be saying the words I learned from tutorial but withhout that tutroial I would have failed
@TheSnarkKnight Here is a simple example. My manager in other peer absense asked me how would payment gateway work and I told him the error he was having was related and it made sense to him but If someone would have asked me to do it hands on
I had change in my nature, so this peer want to compete with me in Sass, so he copy pasted and used it with his style of learning but showing manger he is doing it
when i asked why u did that and can u fix this error, the way he did it was so dumb
he didn't even use the CSS class he created and asked me if I ws happy
@Nofel remember though that a tutorial will have all the extraneous bits cut out - so you'll never see all the mistakes etc that the person made while they were learning it
@Nofel that pill would be awesome if it were real :)
@Nofel generally this impression is a fallacy.. people "get" different things at different speeds, somethings you struggle on and they get in 5 mins and there will be other things where the reverse is true
Take me for example... I've been mucking around with CSS for years and I still don't "get" it. SQL on the other hand I can make dance on a pin. And I've known plenty of people who can make CSS do things that I'm pretty sure are actually Magic disguised as code but couldn't wrap their heads around a simple SELECT statement
JOINS are another case where I think how you get taught it matters massively, when I had SQL lectures at university I honestly couldn't even begin to wrap my head around JOINs - once I had a database to play with where I understood the relationships between the rows I picked it up dead easy
@MisterPositive I had lovely cookies yesday with pistacho, punes, almond, white choclate and other delights in it.
@motosubatsu nothing beats right direction n hands on exp
Love the way I was listening to a talk where the person said, "It is software and not hardware coz u can rewrite ur mistake so go ahead do a lot of mistakes"
@MisterPositive I'm planning on trying to make some cookies soon as part of my adhoc plan to learn baking. I've already had successful Mince pies and flapjacks so cookies to follow soon.
well, here's out it works. My boss is actually the owner of the company that employs me. We (my whole project team) are contracted to a certain large telco. The sponsor of the project, a director, is the one who was laid off.
@Nofel latte = espresso + hot milk, "frothy" coffee is usually a cappuccino which is espresso + lower quantity of hot milk and the milk has high pressure steam passed through it to whip it up into a foam. The taste isn't a million miles apart to be honest, the main difference is in texture - a cappuccino is "fluffier" and is a bit "lighter" to drink as a result.
@Nofel I'm sure I can work out a way to get you some cookies.. it might have to wait until I've got the technique right, I'm hopelessly inept in the kitchen and my first attempts tend to be something of a disaster
@Nofel I'm one of those "instant learners" Believe me, it comes with it's own set of problems. Don't worry about how others learn, find the way you learn, and run with it.
@Nofel no, it's about 50/50. It's just then when someone gets laid off, everyone gets nervous and conversation is muted. Hopefully it's just a middle-management reorg and won't affect our project.
And at some point soon, someone will turn up with the sole purpose of overcomplicating perfectly straight-forward answers to perfectly straight-forward questions.
probably planned reorganization. she didn't know it was coming, but I'm sure those above her planned it a month or so ago as part of a larger reorg. There's nothing on the net about layoffs, but we'll have to see. Could be just Mobility that's shifting some things around.
Not really. He's under stress because he's concerned about the funding of our project for next year. It was already tentatively approved (even by the ex-boss' boss) through June, but until something is signed it's up in the air. And this is an unwanted variable.
I've been reading some anonymous message boards and apparently, they do layoffs by rounds. On October 18 they told all those who were in "affected groups". Those in affected groups get an email with an offer of severance. If they accept it, they get a check and they're gone...
If they don't accept it, they wait about a month and find out if they're one of those being laid off. Either way, they get severance.
based on her tenure, she should get 48% of her annual salary. It's 4% per year for management up to a 50% maximum and she was here 12.5 years.
As long as they don't kill my project (which obviously comes out of a different pocket), I'm good. Last time I was a direct contractor and got caught up in a "get rid of all contractors" wave. That was 10 years ago.
The other bit of hope for me is that I'm in Technical Operations Support (TechOps) and even if they decide to wind down the project, they still need to support it.
@ChrisE Ooooh! I remember that too. Shuffling people from areas where fnding was cut to areas and projects that were fully funded. It was like a freakin' game of chess
It's currently in use but it's being significantly enhanced. The problem is that the one driving the enhancements is the one who got laid off. Fortunately, her boss is a huge pusher of analytics which is what we're mostly building on now.
So I'm in a group whose sole purpose is one project. If they do cuts to the budget for the project, my boss decides who gets the axe to make up for whatever shortfall. There's also another company that works on the project, but they've been drawing down their numbers.
It's all up in the air, tbh
wow, looks like Verizon just whacked a bunch this week too.
I think they're just cutting costs. Personally, I think it's to improve share price.
AT&T wants to by TW, VZW has been at nearly the same price for half a decade and buys crap. They're probably trying to look better to shareholders, especially VZW.
Think about it. Yahoo. Verizon actually bought Yahoo.
Of course if the ATT/TW merger goes through, ATT will own MySpace. :)
Observing for last 5-6 months how protection works (or more precisely fails to work) leaves me quite disappointed. Unless stats show that my observations somehow miss the big picture, I would say that it is probably broken, at least at the sites I am active at (Programmers and Workplace).
As an ...
@TheSnarkKnight thanks, this way works too. :) Although I am really unhappy how SE team broke that old feature of immediate protection. Makes me wonder if we want to play again that old funny game of work-to-rule to make them feel the pain...
@TheSnarkKnight yeah, tactic is pretty much the same. SE higher ups officially encourage outsiders join unfamiliar sites to upvote stuff in HNQ (site quality norms? what norms, don't bother - just have fun). They love how this way makes target questions stick and entertain. But what if we start doing this really enthusiastically ("work to rule")? Questions in HNQ will stick for really long and this whole thing will become apparently boring (think of questions stuck in there for a week or two)...
...in prior round this work-to-rule game worked great on Stack Overflow questions. :) Although they quickly invented a hack that protected these hoping it won't work anymore. What they missed though is there are 150 other sites that aren't protected like that. If we start voting up HNQ from these other sites things may get... interesting
I'm seriously attempting to be nice and I appreciate (truly) your depth of knowledge of the rules, etc. But I don't get why you seem to have what appears to be such a consuming hatred of HNQ that it appears to almost approach OCD.
Yeah, some crap gets through, but is it really that big a deal?
@ChrisE if memory serves previous time you suspected me of OCD hatred against Joe or link-only answers or LQ review or something like that. Care to pick one OCD for me and stick with it? Or you prefer to label every comment of mine with a new sort of a neurosis
@DavidK three answers from low rep users have to be deleted, not two (for the sake of precision two deleted answers can trigger auto-protection in case if these were flagged as spam). Maybe I have an OCD about auto-protection
@DarkCygnus yeah I remember that. Question and answers made pretty good food for thought. @TheSnarkKnight negative score may be because some voters expressed disagreement with proposal, that's how meta works. Quality of the question itself looks good to me, guess if it was the only motivation like at non-meta sites the score would be positive
@gnat This reminds me that, given the fact that votes in meta are more agree/disagree they should remove the on-hover text saying "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful" and say instead "I don't agree with the question."
But posting that, I fear, will probably be taken the same way as that other question of mine.
@DarkCygnus that suggestion would have good chances to be downvoted to death because it would be a blatant duplicate (yes it was already proposed to adjust the hover text this way)
@gnat could it be asked in a way that it is not a feature request or similar, but more like discussion on "Why does the hover say X if it is known that DV really mean Y?"
@DarkCygnus unlikely. if memory serves suggestion to change hover was answered with a fairly detailed explanation of why it is done this way. To increase chance for positive reception you'd have to find and refer it and explain what is missing, wht needs to be additionally explained. Shog once posted a hint on how to survive meta, I think it was all about doing and explaining research prior to posting
Every day, good-hearted people come to these sites and run into serious problems. And then you come here or to another meta site, seeking to propose a solution to the problem you've encountered... And no one cares.
Your discussion gets ignored
Your feature-request gets downvoted
Your bug gets s...
What exactly is meta? Why/how is it different? What goes here?
Meta Stack Exchange is a special place for suggestions, bugs, support questions, and discussion about the Stack Exchange sites. It is the only place where more frivolous discussions are allowed. Meta is also harsh(er) to your feeling...
Meme: Changing your display name on a whim.
Originator: Welbog
Cultural Height: TBD
Official Response: Limited to one change every 30 days.
Background: User Welbog likes to change his profile whenever it will make a post of his seem funnier. Other times it seems to just be on a whim. He will also...
awww, hate it when I have some time writing an answer and the post gets deleted (in this case OP accepted dupe)
Is there a point in wanting to VTRE if the OP accepted a dupe? I think it does, because not only the OP can benefit from such post, and it should allow it to be opened for more answer that complement the ones given.
It is my understanding that when someone proposed a duplicate and the OP accepts that as a duplicate that it's put on hold by Community.
So if the person asking the question is calling it a duplicate too, why is it still available to reopen? It seems to me that the OP accepting the duplicate is...
If I want to draw people's attention to a post on a child meta site, how can I do that? I want to get people involved in a discussion over at Area 51 to see what they think of the idea, because it requires opinions from the community. However, posts on the discussion zone of Area 51 rarely get ac...