Posts by Herik

Read IBM's note to staff announcing mandatory training and 10% pay cut

Re: ahhhh its the old

Been there, had a breakdown or two about it, dreadful environment.

Manadatory training, they will still have to meet imposible utilisation targets, and the "training" will just be something they are supposed to make up in order to tick a box on an appraisal form.

Lawsuit claims SpaceX laid off hundreds without proper notice, pay

Underperforming

Underperforming, in the context of one large US IT company, recently positioning more into software, means the bottom 10% rated. Oh, and that can rating can be forced not by the employees performance but by the performance of the a) Market. b) Management c) Sales team. "Your division has not done well so we are handing out mostly average and below performer ratings for that group" Those folks could be doing 60 hour weeks and doing above what the average joe does, its just a way US Corporate culture "encourages" others to do better/more or they may be next.

Anyone who has worked for a large corporate will have seen this version of "performance" culture. It is merely a great getting folks to work them seleves into the grave that bit quicker.

Your kids' chances of becoming programmers? ZERO

God that took me back to my school days. My programs inevitably came back with syntax errors (bad hand writing I found out was a product of dyslexia, which I discovered I had just before my finals at Uni). As a product of this I failed my computer o'level, yet now have a 2:1 in computing . . oh and a C&G in computer programming (from using DIBOL on a PDP-10 iirc)

But aswell as Basic (which I could practise at home on my ZX-81) we had . . . CESIL . . . still had to send coding sheets off from our Burnley school to Blackburn to have it mistyped tho !.

IBM PCjr STRIPPED BARE: We tear down the machine Big Blue would rather you forgot

Remember programming PC's at this time with Zorland's C manual in one hand and Nortons PC internals in the other. Always wondered what the PCjr was,

Nortons book always had a star against stuff to indicate that a PCjr did not do things quite like PC, or could not do em at all.

And 6845 . . . .ohhh I remember that from BBC days.

Get one of those early IBM lap tops next !.