Chinese tech firms are throwing out applicants over the age of 30

u're already

in danish poison and married is the same word ..

[snip]

Happily married 58 years ;-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

| 1962 |

Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions, by understanding what nature is hiding.

"It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness." -James Barrie

As opposed to being unemployable for the last 20 years.

IBM used to say that they liked wild ducks, as long as they flew in formation. There's a lot of wisdom in that.

There are ways of pushing the envelope without pissing people off.

I think you'll find it more common in large companies where people can be hidden for skunkworks sorts of purposes. Small employers tend to have the owners looking over everyone's shoulders. Worse, second-generation owners.

My employer used to put a premium on gray hair. After five years of explosive growth, they're hiring a lot more newly minted engineers and very few older folks. It may even make sense, long term.

You can't convince softies of that. A the PPoE, they made me spin a board instead of adding some trivial logic to the software. The lead programmer whined about all the paperwork needed to release a software ECO. Of course, the exact same paperwork was needed for a hardware ECO but that didn't carry any weight.

It's true that one skill I don't think people "my age" (20s, 30s) seem to have been taught well is how to haggle/negotiate effectively. Even when you're holding most of the high cards employers (and people in general) have a tendency to bluff but it pays off to try and figure out who really needs who more.

I sez: don't be afraid to walk out on a bad deal or hang up on someone if they're being a pain. If you were wrong it probably doesn't really matter. If you were right they'll call back (and will likely be much more accommodating.) It's just business it doesn't make you a bad person.

're already employed, watch out, you won't be after you reach the magic exp iration age/date.

s, you probably should think of moving to a better employer.

have been working as a sub-contractor ever since. He may be a great sub-co ntractor, as he keeps on telling us he is, but he doesn't come across as so mebody who would have been all that pleasant to work with.

I wonder who that would be? I was last employed in May 2003, which is only

15 years ago. Nobody has offered me a job since then (though I've had a cou ple of interviews) which makes me unemployed, rather than unemployable. At 75, it's unlikely that I'll get any of the jobs I do apply for, but I'd con tend that I do have saleable skills, but only in a very narrow market.

Wisdom and IBM aren't words you see coupled often. IBM hired krw, which has to have been unwise, and let Phil Hobbs move on, which was even less wise.

Tom Peters eulogised them in hs 1982 book

along with Hewlett Packard. Whatever they were doing right at the time - wh ich allowed them to sell their hardware for three times what it cost to mak e it, when everybody else had to make do with twice - they've stopped doing quite so right since then. Apple now seems to be the company with a licens e to over-charge, and one has to remember that the word "prestige" is cogna te with "prestidigitation" which is to say it's about making an impression, rather than delivering a service.

IBM's famously white-shirted salesmen were all about creating an impression .

Pushing the envelop always involves telling other people that they could ha ve done something better, or could be doing something better, and excites " not-invented-here" reactions. You can be as diplomatic as you like, but som ebody else is always going to be pissed off to some extent, even if only by the fact that they didn't see it first.

Liberals tend to be philosophical about the side-effects of progress. Conservatives, like krw, tend to deny that what's on offer is actually prog ress.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

In message , snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com writes

In the 70s here it was said that Hewlett Packard sacked you at 30. I don't know true this was, but they did seem to have a lot of young high-flyers.

Brian

--
Brian Howie

In message , Tom Gardner writes

I've known analogue hardware designs that were a bit like that.

Brian

--
Brian Howie

The salesmen (of products and methodologies) certainly do :(

But then electronic engineers are also prone to giving the same idea different names, and also different ideas the same name.

There's bugger all difference between hardware and software, principally because people and money are involved.

I never saw that, and when Princess Fiorina was in charge, this

went around the internal usenet like wildfire. Many suspect an HP employee was the instigator.

Heavily snipped to whet your appetite...

"Your truly devoted employee, one who honestly believes in his or her company and is faithful to its mission and its products, is an absolute gem, impossible to find," explained Ken Chesley, human resources director for CitiGroup. "That's why they're so easy to sell. Companies are yearning for employees like that."

While many firms have long nurtured their staffs in an effort to increase loyalty, the revelation that these employees themselves were a cash cow is credited to Hewlett-Packard, a company well known for low turnover and an allegiant workforce.

"There was this guy in my department named Stan who had been with the company for almost 15 years," said HP executive Margaret Carter. "Day in and day out, he did everything we asked, never complained, and was viciously loyal to our products."

"So one night, after Stan stayed up for 24 hours finishing a project, I had an epiphany: 'This guy is worth his weight in gold. I bet I could sell him and make a killing.'"

Only sensible thing slowman has said since he drifted senile.

Actually, I'm a teddy bear... until you demonstrate that you're an idiot, then you're OUT.

I continue to stay busy. I'd go nuts otherwise. There's always some new "puzzle" to solve.

[snip]

Sometimes it's necessary to piss people off... it's easier (legally) to have people quit, than have to fire them.

[snip] ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    | 
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142    Skype: skypeanalog |             | 
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  | 
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     | 

     Thinking outside the box... producing elegant solutions, 
              by understanding what nature is hiding. 

"It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that 
is the secret of happiness."  -James Barrie

ls, you probably should think of moving to a better employer.

Thompson must be senile, if he thinks that I haven't said anything sensible recently. His idea of "sensible" and mine may differ.

o have been working as a sub-contractor ever since. He may be a great sub-c ontractor, as he keeps on telling us he is, but he doesn't come across as s omebody who would have been all that pleasant to work with.

Anybody can be a teddy bear as longs as everybody agrees with them. It's de aling with differences of opinion which is tricky. Jim-out-of-touch-with-re ality-Thompson has more of these differences of opinion than most, and his capacity for producing a rational explanation of why he's right is about a s good as krw's.

His conviction that Arizona's public education system is the cat's pyjamas, when it's own published self-audits show that is is below the US average, while still not being as cheap as Utah or Idaho, is indicative of his capa city to understand evidence, and his enthusiasm for ignoring evidence that doesn't fit his preconceived notions.

Jim's been "unemployed" - if busy - for longer than that.

But you don't have to be employed to find them.

It's try that you often have to be pretty direct to get people to realise t hat you aren't agreeing with them, and that their carefully crafted project plans are a heap of irrelevant nonsense. The art is to persuade them that everything was implied in the original project plan, if you take a sufficie ntly detached view of the activities that have to be fitted together.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Stan didn't run enough dread-game on his employer, the best-treated employees are the ones they're terrified of losing, not the ones they're sure of keeping.

Not at HP, at least when Bill and Dave and the HP Way were still alive.

The revisionist history of Apple is that Steve Jobs wasn't particularly innovative as a designer or particularly effective as a manager, Apple was just full of dead weight circa late 1990s and he was the right guy to clean house and pack the company full of the right talent at the right time of convergence of processor, Internet, and battery technology to make devices like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad viable.

After that his grandiosity and obsession with personal loyalty was a liability and _he_ became the dead weight. People are loyal to their wives, families, friends, countries - what kind of madman is loyal to an iPod or a Steve Jobs?

I'm not intimately familiar with the history of HP as most of it was before my time, but I'd bet the reason the story ended up the way it did wasn't primarily because the new management didn't have a one-for-all-and-all-for-one mentality. They were just bad, in numerous ways.

Bill and Dave treated employees as /people/ they trusted, and the trust was reciprocated.

Princess Fiorina explicitly stopped the HP Way, replacing it with the incomprehensible "Rules of the Garage". She, and the board, treated employees as impersonal resources, not people.

Small examples of the trust inherent in the HP Way...

When in financial difficulty in the early 80s everybody from the top to the bottom accepted a 10% pay cut on the understanding that after the sticky patch the cuts would be rescinded. And that is exactly what happened.

When the UK government introduced a wages freeze, HP moved the UK payday from the end of the month to the beginning of the month, effectively giving everybody a 1/12 pay rise.

There are many other examples.

It is easy to be cynical about the fabled "HP Way". Those that were there knew it was subtle, real, and significant.

I have experienced that satisfaction. I have also quit a job 7 times and got rehired 8. My phone rang.

So the CEO making 10 mil/year takes a 10% pay cut and the janitor making

30k a year takes a 10% pay cut. That sounds pretty fa...HEY WAIT A SECOND!

Yes, in fact it is (though why the janitor is an employee is left up to the idiot lefty who dreamed up this scenario). Chances are the CEO is taking a lot more than that, since his compensation package includes incentives.