Author Archives: Tim Hall

Scott linked to this Yahoo News about someone being arrested in an American shopping mall for wearing a T shirt with the words “give peace a chance”.

The fact that the mall owner is within his legal rights doesn’t mean that he’s not acting like a jerk.

It’s cases like this that make me realise how much the ‘utopian’ society advocated by the more extreme libertarians would suck for everyone other than the very rich. When everything outside your own front door is owned by someone else, probably some faceless and unaccountable corporation, you’ll be forced to obey someone else’s stupid and arbitary rules the moment you step outside your front door. America’s sacred 1st Amendment? Forget it!

Caveat Lector pointed me at this article. This bit jumped out at me early on in the document

Highly skilled jobs remain, and pay well, because basic design, prototyping and pilot production will still be done here, but even if you have skills, there are problems getting hired. Human Resources departments haven’t one clue in Hell how to evaluate skilled technical workers. They try to match exact experience and training to exact job requirements, and demand 3 years experience for specialties that have only existed for 18 months. Thousands of technical jobs go unfilled, while thousands who could do those jobs are asking, “Do you want fries with that?”.

If you’re over 40, the technology employment picture becomes really grim. You have abilities far beyond a 28 year old’s, but he’s the one that’s going to get hired. For over 40s, there are many opportunities in consulting, especially in small and medium business, but that takes social skills and above all, selling skills, exactly what many chose technical careers to avoid.

So what does all this mean to the small business manager? Simple – whether you’re looking for a consultant or an employee, you have a large pool of experienced over 40 technology workers to choose from, and you won’t have to compete tooth and nail with corporate employers. Look for a track record of flexibility, and let the corps pay for the young ones’ experience.

Having turned 40 a couple of years back, I can confirm the job market is tough.

The real meat of the article, though, is it’s scathing attack on Micro$oft, and their future plans, especially the way they’re rewriting windows allowing it to reconfigure or disable things the moment you do anything the Micro$oft doesn’t like. I certainly don’t like the way they’re moving from a licence model to a subscription model, so if you don’t pay your subscription, it will lock up your data. This will give them the power to extort as much money from their ‘customers’ as they can, because if their victims don’t pay up, M$ will put them out of business.

Of course, some of this may be exaggeration. But if it’s true, this is scary stuff.