Posts by Steve Massey

Freelancers might be taxed as employees after High Court ruling

Re: Three Options.

Because, the cost if living is much higher in Switzerland. I've just returned to the UK after living in Zurich for 4 years. Plus (and even my Swiss friends agree), the Swiss government would tax air if they could get away with it. Don't make Switzerland to be the land of milk and honey - it isn't.

Many Swiss-Germans, cross the border and do their monthly shopping in Germany due to the price differences. Infact many Swiss live in Germany and work in Switzerland due to the difference in costs.

Living in Switzerland was an experience. But the Swiss-germans are nationalist and racist (not all, just mainly the older generation). Their SVP party (which gets the most votes) makes the BNP party look timid.

Everything in Switzerland is to the benefit of the companies not the public. Trying to move out of an apartment (outside of the official leaving months - remember you are only allowed to "officially" move out of an apartment is in two months in the year. April and September "i think"). If you want to move out on any other month you have to do the job of the landlords (advertising of the apartment, finding a suitable applicant - which has to be vented by the landlords and they can easily reject - and as such the process starts again). You have to get professional cleaning done (expensive), the walls will generally have to be painted by professionals (expensive) - before the landlord will even accept the apartment is suitable to be handed over.

Even if you have caused no damage at all to the apartment, your deposit will be void, as you will have to spend a good portion on that for the cleaning.

Add all this above, and that Zurich only had 57 available apartments 6 weeks ago (was in both Blick and 20 minutes), and that everyone tries to move out on the official months... it ain't pretty.

Now add that Switzerland hardly ever runs stories about the problems inside the country (one of the highest sucide rates in europe), a teenage who brought his swiss army gun home (but also took some bullets as well) shooting and killing another teenage at a tram stop... no mention in the regional newspapers. A young boy threw himself infront of a train right in front of me (i had bits of his... flesh... on my jacket, and watched his shoe roll passed me with his foot still inside)... no mention of this in the regional news.

As a drunken swiss bloke told me in the pub in Zurich - "You expats are nothing but slaves to the Swiss people. We only let you live here to make us money. If you didn't make us money you wouldn't care about you".

The best thing about Switzerland? The expat community. Go figure.

Disclaimer: All the above is regarding the Swiss-German side of Switzerland, the Swiss-French were completely different and far more laid back.

IT pay jumps as skills gap widens

My views

I got a honours degree in IT back in 97. I then got a job (via my father) contracting for a year. All i did was look after the stocks system (which i was very bad at). Once that contract ended, i decided to start at the bottom and work my way up (IT helpdesk, changing passwords for a large multi-national company).

Fast forward 10 years, i'm now part of the Strategic Initiatives IT team for the same blue-chip company, and moved to their european datacenter in central Europe.

I've now actually quit, and am in the process of moving back to the UK to start a new job / career for a much, much smaller company (but much more technical) - which was the first job i serious applied for once i handed in my notice. The job had been advertised for over a year, and it was (sorry to say) a huge ego boost to get the job after they had interviewed over 30 applications and rejected 100's of CV's.

I honestly believe, that people coming out of uni, with their degree's think that they can land a 30K per year consultantacy position are mis-guided. People need to understand that a degree means nothing without the experience behind it. Many of the students who have trained in our company believe that they are THE IT experts, when there are far more things to understand in IT other than being able to use a PC and Office - business needs for one thing (hence the desire for "experience" in the job adverts).

An IT degree is like a seed, it needs to be watered with "business experience" to be able to grow in the work-force.

And lastly everything i learnt in uni, has had no impact in my job... ever. It's just a way to show an employer that you are not a lazy-ass person and can learn new ideas, processes / systems as needed.

There's jobs out there, and easy to get - but setting the barrier so high will simply lead to dissappointment.

(sorry for any spelling mistakes, it's late and i couldn't be bothered to correct them).

Anatomy of a malware scam

I got hit.

I'm not even sure how i got this virus (or a variant of it).

I consider myself pretty IT savy, and in all my years with playing with PC's i can count the number of virus's i've gotten on one hand (i.e. 2 - including this one).

I followed a link from the BBC news website - as soon as the page loaded, i got the fake warning message. I quickly took the power cable out of the PC and rebooted. As soon as the OS loaded, i had a background wallpaper of the same warning message. I could only get rid of it, by searching for the .bmp file in the registry.

Then i noticed, that i wasn't able to connect to any websites which were anti-virus sites, or anything related to spyware / malware etc..etc..

I did a full scan via Symantec, but it didn't find a thing.

I managed to download AVG via download.com but again it saw nothing wrong.

Trying to get to IT sites to search forum posts was also blocked.

I couldn't install Spybot-S&D as it needed to connect to the internet for updated files, but their mirror was blocked.

Managed to get on a friends PC and download Malwarebytes software, which after the first scan detected and removed 13 files. Noticed that i didn't do an update on the software first, and luckily the update site wasn't blocked (lots of sites were still blocked after the first scan). Updated, and ran a scan again. This time the software found 10 objects and removed them (after a reboot).

Just in the middle of another scan - but all websites are now working again, and my machine has improved it's performance massively since the recent scans.

As i mentioned, all i did was load a website. I use Firefox 3, and my OS is completely upto date with regards to patching. Also have Symantec constantly running and Blackice firewall - neither managed to stop this. I didn't agree to install any software either.

Informed the BBC and they removed the link - but it could of been an Ad or anything i guess. Horrible piece of software.