Title page for September 2010 Employment Situation Summary

To me, the most depressing number in this week’s report is the tally of discouraged workers, currently at 1.1 million, defined as follows “Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.” Another 2.4 million are marginally attached to the labor force, which means “These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.” They are not counted as unemployed, however, because they had not looked for a job in the four weeks that preceded this latest survey. That means the real tally of unemployed in the US right now is the official count — 14.9 million — plus the 2.4 million “marginally attached” individuals just mentioned, for a total of 17.3 million out of work in varying degrees of workforce engagement.

Yikes! Things aren’t getting too much worse at the moment, but they’re not getting any better, either. This can’t be a good omen for the Democrats, as the party in power, with mid-term elections now less than three months away.

Looking at IT, things are holding steady with a net loss of 1,000 Information jobs (see Table B-1) over the past month. Telecommunications (-3,600) and data processing (-1,300) lost the most jobs, while publishing (+300), motion picture and sound recording (+800), broadcasting (except Internet, +1,600), and other information services (+300) all eked out modest gains.

Obviously, there’s a whole lotta nothin’ going on right now, in IT in particular, and in the economy in general. For me the “Big Question” has to be: “When things get moving again, will they be going up or down?” I’ll be darned if I can tell.

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Alex van Herwijnen spotted this interesting problem presented…

… which, of course Dan Ferrante noticed that ESPN provided a solution for.

You’re right though, spousal abuse is not funny. But I know what is! Bathroom humor, like what Scott Lewis found at Ticketmaster!

See? Even Avast! anti-virus software is getting a peece of that action (from Viront).

"Really?" Justin Self wrote, "I have to type this? I just needed some help with Java!"

Well Justin, help was out there… but not for your Java. Matt found this combo, which seems to help with the previous pain in the butt.

I guess I’ll take the advice that Tim Gourley saw, at keep it clean from now on.

Moving on, Andy wondered if Bloglines really wanted their CAPTCHA to be linked to the KKK.

"Admittedly, this took me a lot longer to solve than usual," wrote Dan Thompson, "but when I finally got to upload my image, I felt a real sense of achievement."

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After making an offer that met his salary requirements, the candidate made a counter offer: fifteen-thousand dollars more annually plus a signing bonus. Unfortunately, our budget couldn’t accommodate that, and we declined. Negotiations after that failed, so we formally rescinded the offer for employment so we could talk to more candidates.

Later that day, the CEO of company received a rather childish email from the gentleman. He rambled on about age discrimination, made other accusations, and stated that he "knew" that we were hiring the "other" man that he had met when leaving his interview. His closing words were: "you could have had the best, now you’ll just have the rest!"

The "other" man he referred to was in his early 30s, and was interviewing for an entirely different position (business analyst) in an entirely different department. Looking back, we were all pretty happy that he didn’t accept the position.

The TDWTF Interview (from Christian Riesen)
Two years ago, I was on the job hunt, and one company that looked interesting was a university spinoff. At the interview, I learned that they dealt with some specialization software that had to talk to a few different systems. Most of the code was in PHP, but there also were some .NET and Java components that were used to interface with the hardware’s proprietary drivers.

One thing they were particularly proud of was the fact that the system was recently rewritten from Perl into PHP. Their pride came from the fact that none of them had coded PHP before that, but they had a strong theoretical knowledge, being university guys and all.

Next, they told me about the environment that they work in. As it turned out, the five-man crew worked all in the same room we were interviewing in: a factory attic converted loft style, with one wall made of glass in it so the conference "room" we sat in wouldn’t disturb the others. Each employee had their own desk that was about twenty feet from another, which meant there was a lot of yelling going on. In addition, everyone used whatever the hell they wanted to code on whatever operating system they wanted: Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and one even swore on FreeBSD.

Then came the general technical part of the interview: how I would setup a class, what I would do with a certain language construct, how I would solve a certain problem or assess a situation, all the fun things. Then they showed me two half pages of code in PHP. They told me to look at the code carefully and, if I wanted to change anything, write on the paper what I would change and why. As that would take some time, they left me to it for about twenty minutes. I was certain that they had set me up with a TDWTF-style interview, where they’d pick out a fun code WTF (actually, it looked like this one) and have me turn a convoluted two-page mess into a two lines of code.

When they came back, I complimented them on the clever examples of bad code and presented them with my rewrite. One of interviewers — the chattier of the two — didn’t say another word; he was clearly upset, and I was half-concerned it might get physical. The other guy was a bit better, but he also wore a rather large frown on his face. "This is from our production code", was the reply.

I left the interview shortly after that, with a short bye from the one guy, and just a short nod with some nasty stares from the once-chatty guy.

The Storm-out (from Joshua Armstrong)
I’ve always dreamed of storming out of an interview, but I’ve never actually realized that goal. That is, until my interview with a certain "tech recruiting" firm.

First things first, I was lured in under the guise that I’d be actually interviewing for a job, not being primped for another interview. The firm’s client was, as the technical recruiter put it, "an ISP like Yahoo! or Google." I thought to myself, neither of those companies are ISPs, but I didn’t say anything.

When we moved on to the technical portion of the interview, his first question was "do you had any experience working at a server." And just to be extra clear, those were his actual words: "working at a server."

"Well, yeah of course," I diplomatically responded, "I am a network admin, after all… and I’m physically at servers all the time. That’s what you meant, right?"

"No no," he clarified, "were any of the businesses you’ve worked at servers? That is, would you consider them to be a server?"

I said, "Err, uhh…. I don’t know," and things went downhill from there.

"Have you ever connected to the database?" he asked next.

"Huh? Do you mean in code? Admin tools? Which database platform do you mean?"

He paused for a moment and said, "sounds good to me. Do you have experience working at an ISP?"

"I think you’re using a different definition of ISP than me," I responded, "what I mean is… I wouldn’t have considered Google to be an ISP, but a search engine. Can you clarify?"

"No, no. They’re actually both ISPs, as they allow people to access websites. Would you consider any of the companies you worked at to be an ISP?"

"Uhh… I guess not."

He scribbled something down on his paper mumbling something about how a bank is probably an ISP and added, "have you troubleshot IIS?"

"Not, but I have maintained several Apache servers."

"Oh good, then you have since Apache is IIS. Moving on, what’s the diff—"

"Err," I cut him off, "they’re both web servers, but Apache is not IIS."

"No, no. It is. Apache is actually a kind of IIS, so yes, you have troubleshot IIS. Anyway, what’s the difference between layer 7 routing and layer 4 routing?"

Finally, an answer I was prepared for. "Layer 7 is the Application Layer, and routing focuses on requests to resources that will be fulfilled in the shortest time. Layer 4, the Transport Layer, routing focuses on ensuring that all paths to a host are utilized proportionally to their bandwidth and response"

"Actually," he gave a confused look, "I was looking for an answer involving, uh, DNS pools and host headers. Shall we just say that was your answer?"

I was pretty frustrated by that point, as I knew this interview was going nowhere, and the "technical recruiter" was grasping at straws and hoping to get me in front of thier "ISP" client. I said, "actually, I was just looking for the door," and got up and left.

Later that day, I just got an e-mail from him thanking me for his time, and asking me to forward two references from each job. He also said that he’d taken the liberty of rewriting my resume to include a couple of things about my experience troubleshooting IIS, and that he was planning on submitting it to his client as soon as I got the references. I ignored the email.

Have tales from your own interview? Then be pal and share them!

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“Then I started looking at the code a little more closely. If I had two words to describe it, they’d be ‘unnecessary complexity.’ And if I had one snippet to describe it, it would be this.”

private void SetAccount(RequisitionData.RequisitionItem requisitionItem,
                        AccountData.Account account, bool automation)
{
    bool allowSetAccount = false;

    if(account != null)
    {
        // if the account entry is being set by automation, ensure that
	// the user hasn't already set a value
        if (automation)
        {
            if (!requisitionItem.IsAccountCodeNull())
            {
                if (requisitionItem.AccountCode == string.Empty)
                    allowSetAccount = true;
                else
                    allowSetAccount = true;
            }
            else
                allowSetAccount = true;
        }
        else
            allowSetAccount = true;

        if (allowSetAccount)
        {
            requisitionItem.AccountID = account.ID;
            requisitionItem.AccountCode = account.Code;
        }
    }
}

Aaron continued, "the beauty of it is that the method is private within the class, and has an ‘automation’ boolean parameter. This parameter is always passed as true."

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"Holger, these folks are experts," his manager replied. "It isn’t cost effective to hire-on this level of expertise full time. We may pay a little more up front, but when we don’t need the consultants anymore, we can hand it off to our internal people."

Holger left that discussion pretty sure he had just been called incompetent. Maybe I should ask the consultants if they’re hiring, Holger wondered to himself, thinking of the big money they pulled down relative to his salary. The thought was still percolating in his head when he sat down with the two newest consultants, Zack and Jack for their status meeting.

Holger hooked his laptop up to the projector and ran through a few recent changes in the configuration database, discussed the implications, and then moved onto other topics. He stopped paying attention to the computer, and it eventually dropped to its screensaver. Moments later, there was some snickering from Zack.

"Having some computer trouble?" Jack asked, mockery in his tone.

Holger glanced at the projection screen and saw that his screensaver was was running merrily. It merrily painted a BSOD to the screen, with plausible driver dumps, merrily churned the disk a little, like it was saving the contents of RAM, and merrily ran through a simulated reboot sequence. After which, the process repeated itself, merrily. "Oh," Holger said, "that happens sometimes. I’ve got it under control. No worries."

"Yeah, whatever," Jack said. The meeting continued.

The product of the meeting, like too many other meetings with consultants, resulted in the need for another meeting. "Let’s see what my calendar looks like," Holger said. He grabbed the mouse, killed the screensaver, and called up his email client.

Zack gasped. "How did you do that?" Jack marveled.

"Oh, that?" Holger said. With his best deadpan, he said, "I got tired of waiting for the reboots to complete. I put together a tool that does an automatic fix and restart, letting me just continue right from where I left off."

Holger waited a beat. After a moment, he was certain that these consultants would realize he was pulling their leg.

Zack was up in a flash and quietly closed the door. Jack leaned across the table towards Holger and asked, "Did you make that on company time? And does anyone here know if you did? Because before we go back into that hallway, I want to buy this off of you."

"You don’t have that kind of cash," Holger said.

"No, but I can put it on the expense account and then pay it off when I get VC funding," Jack said.

Holger spent the next fifteen minutes declining their offers to buy his tool. In the process, he discovered that the consultants had creative and unethical ideas about how to quickly get funding, and that one of them had a trophy wife that would do anything for the kinds of profits they were talking about. "And I do mean anything," Zack said with a leer.

Finally, Holger "confessed". "Look, you guys are generous and all, but I’ve already signed a contract with another company. Even if you could beat their offer, I can’t break a contract."

"Sure you can!"

Holger left the meeting without any interest in finding out if their company had any openings.

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We still consider Samsung’s Hummingbird application processor to be among the very best for mobile computers, but this morning Sammy itself is stepping up the charge to make it look real old real fast. The freshly announced dual-core Orion promises to whip us all into a frenzy of geek lust with “5 times the 3D graphics performance over the previous processor generation from Samsung,” 1080p video encoding and decoding at 30fps, embedded GPS, a native triple display controller, and on-chip HDMI 1.3a interface. Those last two bits mean you can drive two displays on your mobile device while feeding a third, such as a HDTV, all thanks to the one all-powerful chip inside. Availability for “select customers” is coming late this year, with mass production set for the first half of 2011. To say we’re looking forward to it would be a massive understatement.

Continue reading Samsung’s Orion is the 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 we’ve all been waiting for

Samsung’s Orion is the 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 we’ve all been waiting for originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 02:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony just released its 3.42 software update for PlayStation 3 owners. As a mandatory update, PS3 jockeys must accept it if they want to continue accessing the PlayStation Network or PlayStation Store. While Sony’s American mouthpiece isn’t saying much about the release, Sony Japan says that it fixes a “hardware security issue,” and that’s it. Sounds like a patch for PSJailbreak and its open-source variants to us.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

PS3 3.42 software update reportedly patches jailbreak, hates fun originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ever wonder how the single driveshaft in your car manages to power two (or more) wheels simultaneously? The answer is the differential, a device capable of splitting torque dynamically. There are a variety of different types of diffs, from fully unlocked to more pricey limited-slip models, but none are quite like the one created by Harvard graduate student Pratheev S. Sreetharan and professor Robert J. Wood. Dubbed the PARITy (Passive Aeromechanical Regulation of Imbalanced Torques), it’s only five millimeters long and, while such a tiny thing would evaporate if mounted between the rear wheels on a Mustang GT, it’s destined for rather smaller applications: tiny, winged micro air vehicles. The scientists proved its effectiveness by clipping one wing on a PARITy-equipped drone and, despite the imbalance in lift surface, the robo-bee maintained level flight — differential automatically flapping the tinier wing more quickly to compensate. You know what that means: keeping our robot overlord’s spies grounded just got a little bit harder.

PARITy differential keeps your MAV flying level even if you clip its wings originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Should there be an international award for Cheekiest Man of the Year, it’d have to go to Meizu’s shameless Jack Wong. Shortly after Apple’s keynote last week, the CEO of KIRFdom seized the opportunity to cry foul on the new iPod touch, claiming it “looks a bit like” his forthcoming M9II Android phone, as pictured above. Wait, M9II? Turns out even though the M9 has yet to materialize in early October, Mr. Wong already has an enhanced model to be brought forth by his faithful unicorns. Assuming both M9 series devices will carry the same Meizu-fied Android 2.2 software, the only known differences on the M9II include a larger 4-inch display (as opposed to 3.5 inches at 960 x 640), the additional front-facing camera plus flash for the rear camera, and a Cortex-A9 CPU. To play devil’s advocate, we’d actually suggest Wong skip the M9 for this lovely dream phone, but we’re probably too late — check out his snazzy prototype M9 after the break.

Continue reading Meizu CEO Jack Wong: Oh hey, the new iPod touch ‘looks a bit like the M9II’

Meizu CEO Jack Wong: Oh hey, the new iPod touch ‘looks a bit like the M9II’ originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Back in 1988, Russian engineer Vladimir Demin combined a bunch of solenoids (loops of copper wire) and a Bayan (a Russian accordian), to create a self-playable instrument controlled by his awesome, self-built computer. Yes, we’re impressed, and you will be too, if you take a look at the video below.

Continue reading Computer controlled Bayan from 1988 makes us want to go back to the past

Computer controlled Bayan from 1988 makes us want to go back to the past originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Sep 2010 22:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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