Posts by Stephen Judd
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
IT librarian
Sir, do you have a moment to talk about Koha?
;-)
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Hard News: Spring Timing, in reply to bmk,
Companies hiring in ICT never want to take people with less than a couple of years of experience which means there aren’t enough experienced people to fill the positions and so on.
I am happy to say that is not what I have been doing. I, and quite a few of my colleagues with hiring responsibility, like taking on new grads as junior developers, or better yet starting with students who are still finishing up (we pay our interns). Sacha's observations notwithstanding, we do invest in people by running in-houses course taught by our senior staff. The payoff is that after a year bedding in we get several years of high productivity from grateful people before they bugger off elsewhere. And they sometimes come back too.
There's no shortage of candidates from my POV. There's a shortage of very smart diligent people with social skills. The experience and technical skills we can fix, the personal qualities are the hard part. (Am actually starting to think about the social skills too. They're clearly teachable, but it's less obvious how we should do that.)
We don't ever use recruiters. I suspect it's in recruiters' interests to talk up shortages as it makes their services seem more valuable.
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I'm just going to leave this here:
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Rex Croft must have registered vital.org.nz for me around 1998, so I've had my site, email address etc for at least that long. /namedrop
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Up Front: Floodland, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Yep I’m in for a PAS working bee etc too.
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Up Front: Floodland, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Gives me a sense of hope at last for the electorate’s representation.
Glad to hear it. He certainly knows how to organise an effective camapaign.
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Hard News: Diverse Auckland: are we…, in reply to Bart Janssen,
It’s easy to generalise about groups of people by cultural, religious, racial or any criteria if you don’t have personal contact with them. When your really cool and nice workmate is purple it’s hard to then mouth off at the pub about how purple people are all scumbag leaches on society and we need more purple-people eaters.
I'm sure that happens sometimes, but equally, I've actually tried when talking with racists to point out mutual acquaintances who break a racist stereotype and the response is usually "oh well he's different" or "X isn't a _real_ Maori" or any other nonsense that prevents them acknowledging they are wrong or their head exploding.
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Hard News: Drugs, development and reality, in reply to Matt Graylee,
the development of a mechanical harvester in Brazil. That is the way around the expensive labour for flat areas.
Huh, interesting. I thought mechanical harvesting only produced low-grade results because of uneven ripening of the cherries?
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Coffee beans only make sense if you have very cheap labour. That's why it's not grown in Australia commercially, for example. I would think the risk-adjusted cash yield per acre needs to be comparable (ie I'd accept a lower cash payout for a lower risk of legal consequences etc).