The benefits are great at the USPS. However, salaries aren't great. It's difficult to witness much of the waste of deadbeat full-timers and even some incompetent staffed contractors. Outsourcing to Accenture and IBM are often just massive give-aways with no-bid contracts. It's a demoralizing environment along with finicial state of the Postal Service.
Managers have the same benefits. Plus, they get to telecommute 2-3 days a week! Since that benefit was given a year or so ago many of the managers have become even more disconnected with their job.
Managers also get bonuses which they deny. The bonuses are called "pay for performance". That's a joke because the metrics used for the PFP bonuses are ridiculous and encourage micromanaging which creates resentment towards supervisors. The entire workforce is demoralized. For most, it's difficult to leave the benefits.
what you describe does sound like it worked out well.
my opinion is that there is enough demand for good programmers for the market to determine good wages/benefits. the usps union in question is working on a new contract. rumor has it they are agreeing to a whopping 3.5% raise spread over 5 years. the last annual raise was 1.2%!
there are a large percentage of "obsolete" CoBOL programmers that weren't transitioned properly to web applications. many of whom perform non-technical/light-duty tasks. the mostly younger folks carry the majority of the load. it's mostly a result of incompetent management whom never enforce accountability.
Any variables created in the method are cleaned up when the thread leaves the method. I've never heard of clean up being done after execution leaves a try-catch block. Does anyone know the answer to this?
I see too many programmers that get in it for the money and not the passion. Having passion removes the need to be formally instructed. Passion gives people the drive to excel and be the best. However, you do get a big picture view of what's going on having earned a degree. The slackers tend to be the non-self-teaching among us.
Bubble Smubble. This bubble has a long ways to go before it pops. We're coming out of a recession! We have a few years left before we should be concerned.
I agree. I'm guessing that the author doesn't even know what his database tables look like. Starting top-down doesn't make sense. As an OO programmer, it's not best practice to start a project using concrete classes. We should always code with scalability and flexibility in mind.
Why not just put the username in the cookie and make the user enter their password each time? If a user doesn't want to enter their password then they must not give that site much value.
I like the company, but don't see the big deal. I did this very thing back in 2002-3 calling a DLL to convert Word to HTML. Their implementation is much prettier of course.
A book that I would recommend for refactoring object oriented code (Java in particular) is Refactoring-Improve the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler (a friend to the Go4). Written well and in a simliar format at Design Patterns-Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Go4 (Gang of Four).
This idea of a 'Kill Switch' is nonsense. Lieberman is a pussy as he scares easily. Imagine the propaganda people are going to spread, like "the government wants to control us". Actions like this will cause a revolt because of false facts.
Managers have the same benefits. Plus, they get to telecommute 2-3 days a week! Since that benefit was given a year or so ago many of the managers have become even more disconnected with their job.
Managers also get bonuses which they deny. The bonuses are called "pay for performance". That's a joke because the metrics used for the PFP bonuses are ridiculous and encourage micromanaging which creates resentment towards supervisors. The entire workforce is demoralized. For most, it's difficult to leave the benefits.