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  • Join the Visual Studio diagnostics team

    - by Daniel Moth
    I have a Program Manager position open on the Visual Studio diagnostics team which owns the debugger, the profiler tools, and IntelliTrace. If you have never worked for Microsoft you may be wondering if the PM position at Microsoft is for you. Read the job description to see what the role entails and to see if you are a fit. I’ll preempt the usual question and say that this is a Redmond-based position. Beyond that, if you are interested in what you read and you think you have what it takes, then email me. http://www.microsoft-careers.com/job/Redmond-Program-Manager-2-Job-WA-98052/2321458/ Comments about this post by Daniel Moth welcome at the original blog.

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  • How to capitalize maximally on location-independence … my personal #1-incentive for working as a developer

    - by SomeGuy
    To me the ultimate beauty in working as a developer is the fact that given a nice CV, your are going to find a new job, everywhere at any time. So I would like to ask if somebody here as experience in working while travelling for example. Or job-hopping from metropolis to metropolis every, say, six months. For example I have been investigating for how to get to Brazil. But it seems like that working as an employee in Brazil would be no option, b/c it takes a lot of time/money/effort to get the proper visas and permissions. So the only practical solution would be to freelance and the just travel, while getting your job done wherever you are. I bet my ass that there are loads of IT-guys out there and on here who know exactly what I am talking about. I'm looking forward to interesting ideas and stories.

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  • Is there a very simple XML Editor/Viewer?

    - by Paul Spangle
    Part of our support job is to look at XML documents sent to our systems by our clients that have failed to load correctly. I do this by pasting the file in to Visual Studio as an XML file and VS colours it and adds line-breaks, indenting, etc. and it's then usually quite simple to spot the error and manually fix it and resubmit the document. Do I really have to use Visual Studio to do this? OK, it does the job quite well, but I'd have thought that something like Notepad++ would do the job just as well with a fraction of the machine resource usage. Is there are plugin for Notepad++ or another bit of freeware that can make XML look pretty and let me make simple edits?

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  • Do certain corporations hold more weight on a resume?

    - by Ryan
    Would a developer/tester position at Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. (any large tech. company of which most people have heard) be more valuable on a resume than working as a developer/tester somewhere where tech. isn't the main objective (shipping company, restaurant chain, insurance company, etc.)? Let's say you have two offers, and you only plan to stay with whichever company for 5 years, before trying to get a better position at a different company. One at Google that has a starting salary of $60,000, and one at some insurance company that has a starting salary of $80,000. I guess what I'm trying to say is... with university's, if someone graduates from MIT or Carnegie Mellon, they can pretty much get a job anywhere. Does someone seem more valuable after having worked at a company like Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.? In other words, would taking the lower paying job be better in the long run since it's at Google, or would it be better to take the higher paying job at the insurance company?

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  • Upgrading Agent Controllers in Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c

    - by S Stelting
    Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c recently released an upgrade for Solaris Agent Controllers. In this week's blog post, we'll show you how to upgrade agent controllers. Detailed instructions about upgrading Agent Controllers are available in the product documentation here. This blog post uses an Enterprise Controller which is configured for connected mode operation. If you'd like to apply the agent update in a disconnected installation, additional instructions are available here. Step 1: Download Agent Controller Updates With a connected mode Ops Center installation, you can check for product updates at any time by selecting the Enterprise Controller from the left-hand Administration navigation tab. Select the right-hand Action link “Ops Center Downloads” to open a pop-up dialog displaying any new product updates. In this example, the Enterprise Controller has already been upgraded to the latest version (Update 1, also shown as build version 2076) so only the Agent Controller updates will appear. There are three updates available: one for Solaris 10 X86, one for Solaris 8-10 SPARC, and one for all versions of Solaris 11. Note that the last update in the screen shot is the Solaris 11 update; for details on any of the downloads, place your mouse over the information icon under the details column for a pop-up text region. Select the software to download and click the Next button to display the Ops Center license agreement. Review and click the check box to accept the license agreement, then click the Next button to begin downloading the software. The status screen shows the current download status. If desired, you can perform the downloads as a background job. Simply click the check box, then click the next button to proceed to the summary screen. The summary screen shows the updates to be downloaded as well as the current status. Clicking the Finish button will close the dialog and return to the Browser UI. The download job will continue to run in Ops Center and progress can still be viewed from the jobs menu at the bottom of the browser window. Step 2: Check the Version of Existing Agent Controllers After the download job completes, you can check the availability of agent updates as well as the current versions of your Agent Controllers from the left-hand Assets navigation tab. Select “Operating Systems” from the pull-down tab lets to display only OS assets. Next, select “Solaris” in the left-hand tab to display the Solaris assets. Finally, select the Summary tab in the center display panel to show which versions of agent controllers are installed in your data center. Notice that a few of the OS assets are not displayed in the Agent Controllers tab. Ops Center will not display OS instances which do not have an Agent Controller installation. This includes Enterprise Controllers and Proxy Controllers (unless the agent has been activated on the OS instance) and and OS instances using agentless management. For Agent Controllers which support an update, the version of agent software (in this example, 2083) appears to the right of the currently installed version. Step 3: Upgrade Your Agent Controllers If desired, you can upgrade agent controllers from the previous screen by selecting the desired systems and clicking the upgrade button. Alternatively, you can click the link “Upgrade All Agent Controllers” in the right-hand Actions menu: In either case, a pop-up dialog lets you start the upgrade process. The first screen in the dialog lets you choose the upgrade method: Ops Center provides three ways to upgrade agent controllers: Automatic Upgrade: If Agent Controllers are running on all assets, Ops Center can automatically upgrade the software to the latest version without requiring any login credentials to the system SSH using a single set of credentials: If all assets use the same login credentials, you can apply a single set to all assets for the upgrade process. The log-in credentials are the same ones used for asset discovery and management, which are stored in the Plan Management navigation tab under Credentials. SSH using individual credentials: If assets use different login credentials, you can select a different set for each asset. After selecting the upgrade method, click the Next button to proceed to the summary screen. Click the Finish button to close the pop-up dialog and start the upgrade job for the agent controllers. The upgrade job runs a series of tasks in parallel, and will upgrade all agents which have been selected. Once the job completes, the OS instances in your data center will be upgraded and running the latest version of Agent Controller software.

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  • First Foray&ndash;About timeout

    - by SQLMonger
    It has been quite a while since I signed up for this blog site and high time that something was posted.  I have a list of topics that I will be working through and posting.  Some I am sure will have been posted by others, but I will be sticking to the technical problems and challenges that I’ve recently faced, and the solutions that worked for me.  My motto when learning something new has always been “My kingdom for an example!”, and I plan on delivering useful examples here so others can learn from my efforts, failures and successes.   A bit of background about me… My name is Clayton Groom. I am a founding partner of a consulting firm in St. Louis Missouri, Covenant Technology Partners, LLC and focus on SQL Server Data Warehouse design, Analysis Services and Enterprise Reporting solutions.  I have been working with SQL Server since the early nineties, when it still only ran on OS/2. I love solving puzzles and technical challenges.   Enough about me… On to a real problem… SSIS Connection Time outs versus Command Time outs Last week, I was working on automating the processing for a large Analysis Services cube.  I had reworked an SSIS package and script task originally posted by Vidas Matelis that automates the process of adding new and dropping old partitions to/from an Analysis Services cube.  I had the package working great, tested, and ready for deployment.  It basically performs a query against the source system to determine if there is new data in the warehouse that will require a new partition to be added to the cube, and it checks the cube to see if there are any partitions that are present that are no longer needed in a rolling 60 month window. My client uses Tivoli for running all their production jobs, and not SQL Agent, so I had to build a command line file for Tivoli to use to run the package. Everything was going great. I had tested the command file from my development workstation using an XML configuration file to pass in server-specific parameters into the package when executed using the DTExec utility. With all the pieces ready, I updated the dtsconfig file to point to the UAT environment and started working with the Tivoli developer to test the job.  On the first run, the job failed, and from what I could see in the SSIS log, it had failed because of a timeout. Other errors in the log made me think that perhaps the connection string had not been passed into the package correctly. We bumped the Connection Manager  timeout values from 20 seconds to 120 seconds and tried again. The job still failed. After changing the command line to use the /SET option instead of the /CONFIGFILE option, we tested again, and again failure. After a number more failed attempts, and getting the Teradata DBA involved to monitor and see if we were connecting and failing or just failing to connect, we determined that the job was indeed connecting to the server and then disconnecting itself after 30 seconds.  This seemed odd, as we had the timeout values for the connection manager set to 180 seconds by then.  At this point one of the DBA’s found a post on the Teradata forum that had the clues to the puzzle: There is a separate “CommandTimeout” custom property on the Data source object that may needed to be adjusted for longer running queries.  I opened up the SSIS package, opened the data flow task that generated the partition list table and right-clicked on the data source. from the context menu, I selected “Show Advanced Editor” and found the property. Sure enough, it was set to 30 seconds. The CommandTimeout property can also be edited in the SSIS Properties sheet. In order to determine how long the timeout needed to be, I ran the query from the task in the development environment and received a response in a matter of seconds.  I then tried the same query against the production database and waited several minutes for a response. This did not seem to be a reasonable response time for the query involved, and indeed it wasn’t. The Teradata DBA’s adjusted the query governor settings for the service account I was testing with, and we were able to get the response back down under a minute.  Still, I set the CommandTimeout property to a much higher value in case the job was ever started during a time of high-demand on the production server. With this change in place, the job finally completed successfully.  The lesson learned for me was two-fold: Always compare query execution times between development and production environments, and don’t assume that production will always be faster.  With higher user demands, query governors, and a whole lot more data, the execution time of even what might seem to be simple queries can vary greatly. SSIS Connection time out settings do not affect command time outs.  Connection timeouts control how long the package will wait for a response from the server before assuming the server is not available or is not responding. Command time outs control how long a task will wait for results to start being returned before deciding that the server is not responding. Both lessons seem pretty straight forward, and I felt pretty sheepish once I finally figured out what the issue was.  To be fair though, In the 5+ years that I have been working with SSIS, I could only recall one other time where I had to set the CommandTimeout property, and that memory only resurfaced while I was penning this post.

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  • Renaming the sa Account

    - by Tara Kizer
    Today I renamed the sa account on 23 SQL Server 2005/2008 instances.  I used the CMS to assist with this task.  Later we realized all of the SQL Agent jobs were failing on these instances with the following error: “The job failed.  The owner (sa) of job XYZ does not have server access.” We use sa as the job owner, and it had correctly changed the owner to our new name as the sids had not changed.  We were at first confused why the jobs were failing but then realized restarting the SQL Agent service might help.  The restart corrected the problem. If you plan on renaming your sa account (best practice), make sure you restart the SQL Agent service afterwards to avoid failing jobs.  This is perhaps common knowledge, but it was something new learned by me today.

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  • how to be a web developer [closed]

    - by David
    Well, I'm 34 years old, and I have a master degree in computer science, for some how I cannot get a job as a programmer when I was younger, so I got a job related to computer. Recently I work in content management system, and updating the content of web portals. I'm trying to be a web programmer, so I started learning the techniques for web development, and CMS. I have a good knowledge of PHP and Wordpress, but I have a problem when I apply for a job I got the answer "sorry, you have no experience!" how can I solve that, and get a career in programming and web development?

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  • Is it ok to become junior at 27? [closed]

    - by Dvole
    I'm having a computer unrelated job right now, but I want to become a programmer, I have some objective-c and iOS knowledge, studying hard in my free time, etc. I'm looking into getting a junior iOS developer position. It will probably pay half what I earn in my current job, and I am not sure if I will like that. But I am really tired of my job and want to get experience in this field. Also, working as iOS developer is great position, since they are in great demand. My country is Russia. What do you think? Or Should I just do it in my free time, get some programs out in Appstore and look for better position? What would you do?

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  • www.IISJobs.com has been launched.

    - by steve schofield
    Looking for a job related to Microsoft (Internet Information Server)? Or do you have a job opening which requires IIS experience.  Look no further, subscribe to the discussion forum today at http://www.iisjobs.com and be notified as soon as a job is posted or someone responds. Why start IISJobs.com?  I'm not looking to replace Monster, Careers.com.  I've seen in various places where jobs involving Microsoft IIS (Internet Information Server) have been posted.   I thought it would be a good idea to centralize under a easy to remember domain name. :)   My goal is to help the IIS community. Cheers, Steve SchofieldWindows Server MVP - IIShttp://weblogs.asp.net/steveschofield http://www.IISLogs.comLog archival solutionInstall, Configure, Forget

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  • MySQL tech writer position on Oracle jobs site

    - by stefanhinz
    Just in case you missed this, last week I announced that my team is looking for an experienced technical writer. Now the job offer has gone live on the Oracle website. Have a look! That's the EMEA job site, but the position is actually available for Europe or North America. The job offer should appear on the American site soon, too. If you want to join a great team, or if you know someone suitable who does, don't hesitate to contact me!

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  • ETL Software Research Question

    - by WernerCD
    Where I work, we use an in-house ETL solution that's homegrown and has been around for 5-10 years. I'm still new to my data analysis job, but I was wondering about the ETL tools that are out there. This is a new area for me. My situation, and job, is basically digging in a set of databases (DB2, SQL2005, Citrix, Ancient Cobol Database with a SQL Wrapper on top, MySQL, etc). Gather the desired information. combine the different datasets into one set. output into a file of choice (CSV, Tab Separated, Pipe Separated, XLS, etc). FTP to customer. I guess what my real question is, given my job, what are some good ETL suites that I can look at and compare to my in-house tools? This is more to research some other options. Ultimately, I'd either suggest a new solution or get options/ideas to improve our current app.

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  • What should I think about when switching from Python to Java?

    - by Nick Rosencrantz
    I was a Java developer in the early 2000s, switched to Python in 2008 and now Iäm working in Java again. Is there anything special you think I should keep in mind when going back to a Java environment? I used to work with EJB 1.0, I didn't work with EJB 2.0 and now we have JPA instead. I'm comfortable programming in Java and my new job with Java is much better than my Python job even though Python is my favorite language the tools and others things about my Java job makes it much better. I found when I searched jobs that demand for Java developer was much greater than demand for Python programmers- do you have a similar experience? Thank you

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  • Introduction to JBatch

    - by reza_rahman
    It seems batch processing is moving more and more into the realm of the Java developer. In recognition of this fact, JBatch (aka Java Batch, JSR 352, Batch Applications for the Java Platform) was added to Java EE 7. In a recent article JBatch specification lead Chris Vignola of IBM provides a high level overview of the API. He discusses the core concepts/motivation, the Job Specification Language, the reader-processor-writer pattern, job operator, job repository, chunking, packaging, partitions, split/flow and the like. You can also check out the official specification yourself or try things out with the newly released Java EE 7 SDK.

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  • Years experience over unfinished degree?

    - by Daniel Lewis
    I'm currently in my placement year and working for a great software development company. It was always my intention of getting to this stage through university, getting enough academic experience as well as the year’s placement and then try to get a full time programming job without the need to finish my degree. I decided this from an early stage as I have never really liked the whole university environment. I was so unhappy at university and I’m so happy now I’m on my placement year, I really don’t know if I can go back. My question is, do you think companies will take me on if I apply for other jobs after my placement year and not penalize me for not finishing my degree? I guess at the end of the day I don't want to look back on my life and think "god, why didn't I just spend one more year being unhappy to have a job I love" but I know that even if I get a degree I could still end up without a programming job and this worries me more than anything.

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  • Looking for advice on B2B promotion [closed]

    - by IconicDigital
    Can anyone recommend affiliate networks that focus on B2B development. We are about to launch a UK job search engine that allows job boards to list their jobs on the engine. We have decided to keep the advertising in house, with the goal being of keeping the costs down. I was wondering if anyone could offer any advice on potential advertising routes that we could take. For example B2B affiliate networks, adwords etc. We are in the position of launching an empty site and ideally we would like to be attracting recruitment agencies or businesses to signup to either a free or paid account. They can then begin to populate the engine with job listings. An obvious choice so far would be to promote on networks like Linked In. Any ideas? Thanks

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  • Hiring developers - listing IDE as a requirement?

    - by suslik
    I've been looking at some job postings and noticed that a fair amount of them list IDEs under the 'required skills' section, even for senior positions. This is not localized to one company either, but rather it's something that comes up once in every few postings. I am perplexed by this job requirement, as my mentors and some of the best coders I've seen in my life were VIM/Emacs ninjas. Similarly, when I work with people I don't much care what tools they use as long as they are productive on the team. Can someone please explain the rationale behind hiring managers making IDEs an official job requirement?

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  • how can I start developing games? [closed]

    - by miguelacho
    as you may know very well, every individual related with software development is somehow related to the science or the activity that the program was made for, I am currently working as a programmer for a company that is dedicated to build enterprise software for ensurance business, before this job, I was working with a travel agency developing extra modules for the CRM they use (VTiger), so I can say I am related to ERP/CRM, the fact is, I would like to change this to another activity, like developing video games. I'd like to start developing games, by getting a job or making my own project, but: 1) I have no experience developing video games, is that an obstacle if I want to get a job? if is that so, how can I solve it? 2) if I want to make my own project I will need more people, like a graphic disigner or some others, isn't there a way to make the whole game by my own?

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  • Wait random number of minutes

    - by TiborKaraszi
    Why on earth would you want to do that? you ask. Say you have a job that is scheduled to start at the same time over a number of servers. This might be because you have an SQL Server Master/Target server environment (MSX/TSX) or you quite simply script a job and execute that script on several servers. You probably want to spread the load on your SAN and virtual machine host a bit. This is the exact reason I use this procedure. I frequently use MSX servers and I usually add a job step (executing this...(read more)

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  • How much does college (e.g. a compsci major) factor into a programmer's resume? [closed]

    - by Brandon
    I was having an argument with a friend who claims that given roughly equal skill, someone with a college degree from a name school is going to start at a significantly better job (e.g. a higher-end company) for his first job; and because of this, he's also going to be significantly ahead for his second job. Here are my two questions: given equal skill, how much does college factor into a programmer's overall career? if someone has the technical skills to work competently as as programmer, is it worth it for him to go to college first? if the degree is significant, is it significant whether the degree is from an average college or a higher-tier college (e.g. Stanford, MIT)?

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  • PASS: Bylaw Changes

    - by Bill Graziano
    While you’re reading this, a post should be going up on the PASS blog on the plans to change our bylaws.  You should be able to find our old bylaws, our proposed bylaws and a red-lined version of the changes.  We plan to listen to feedback until March 31st.  At that point we’ll decide whether to vote on these changes or take other action. The executive summary is that we’re adding a restriction to prevent more than two people from the same company on the Board and eliminating the Board’s Officer Appointment Committee to have Officers directly elected by the Board.  This second change better matches how officer elections have been conducted in the past. The Gritty Details Our scope was to change bylaws to match how PASS actually works and tackle a limited set of issues.  Changing the bylaws is hard.  We’ve been working on these changes since the March board meeting last year.  At that meeting we met and talked through the issues we wanted to address.  In years past the Board has tried to come up with language and then we’ve discussed and negotiated to get to the result.  In March, we gave HQ guidance on what we wanted and asked them to come up with a starting point.  Hannes worked on building us an initial set of changes that we could work our way through.  Discussing changes like this over email is difficult wasn’t very productive.  We do a much better job on this at the in-person Board meetings.  Unfortunately there are only 2 or 3 of those a year. In August we met in Nashville and spent time discussing the changes.  That was also the day after we released the slate for the 2010 election. The discussion around that colored what we talked about in terms of these changes.  We talked very briefly at the Summit and again reviewed and revised the changes at the Board meeting in January.  This is the result of those changes and discussions. We made numerous small changes to clean up language and make wording more clear.  We also made two big changes. Director Employment Restrictions The first is that only two people from the same company can serve on the Board at the same time.  The actual language in section VI.3 reads: A maximum of two (2) Directors who are employed by, or who are joint owners or partners in, the same for-profit venture, company, organization, or other legal entity, may concurrently serve on the PASS Board of Directors at any time. The definition of “employed” is at the sole discretion of the Board. And what a mess this turns out to be in practice.  Our membership is a hodgepodge of interlocking relationships.  Let’s say three Board members get together and start a blog service for SQL Server bloggers.  It’s technically for-profit.  Let’s assume it makes $8 in the first year.  Does that trigger this clause?  (Technically yes.)  We had a horrible time trying to write language that covered everything.  All the sample bylaws that we found were just as vague as this. That led to the third clause in this section.  The first sentence reads: The Board of Directors reserves the right, strictly on a case-by-case basis, to overrule the requirements of Section VI.3 by majority decision for any single Director’s conflict of employment. We needed some way to handle the trivial issues and exercise some judgment.  It seems like a public vote is the best way.  This discloses the relationship and gets each Board member on record on the issue.   In practice I think this clause will rarely be used.  I think this entire section will only be invoked for actual employment issues and not for small side projects.  In either case we have the mechanisms in place to handle it in a public, transparent way. That’s the first and third clauses.  The second clause says that if your situation changes and you fall afoul of this restriction you need to notify the Board.  The clause further states that if this new job means a Board members violates the “two-per-company” rule the Board may request their resignation.  The Board can also  allow the person to continue serving with a majority vote.  I think this will also take some judgment.  Consider a person switching jobs that leads to three people from the same company.  I’m very likely to ask for someone to resign if all three are two weeks into a two year term.  I’m unlikely to ask anyone to resign if one is two weeks away from ending their term.  In either case, the decision will be a public vote that we can be held accountable for. One concern that was raised was whether this would affect someone choosing to accept a job.  I think that’s a choice for them to make.  PASS is clearly stating its intent that only two directors from any one organization should serve at any time.  Once these bylaws are approved, this policy should not come as a surprise to any potential or current Board members considering a job change.  This clause isn’t perfect.  The biggest hole is business relationships that aren’t defined above.  Let’s say that two employees from company “X” serve on the Board.  What happens if I accept a full-time consulting contract with that company?  Let’s assume I’m working directly for one of the two existing Board members.  That doesn’t violate section VI.3.  But I think it’s clearly the kind of relationship we’d like to prevent.  Unfortunately that was even harder to write than what we have now.  I fully expect that in the next revision of the bylaws we’ll address this.  It just didn’t make it into this one. Officer Elections The officer election process received a slightly different rewrite.  Our goal was to codify in the bylaws the actual process we used to elect the officers.  The officers are the President, Executive Vice-President (EVP) and Vice-President of Marketing.  The Immediate Past President (IPP) is also an officer but isn’t elected.  The IPP serves in that role for two years after completing their term as President.  We do that for continuity’s sake.  Some organizations have a President-elect that serves for one or two years.  The group that founded PASS chose to have an IPP. When I started on the Board, the Nominating Committee (NomCom) selected the slate for the at-large directors and the slate for the officers.  There was always one candidate for each officer position.  It wasn’t really an election so much as the NomCom decided who the next person would be for each officer position.  Behind the scenes the Board worked to select the best people for the role. In June 2009 that process was changed to bring it line with what actually happens.  An Officer Appointment Committee was created that was a subset of the Board.  That committee would take time to interview the candidates and present a slate to the Board for approval.  The majority vote of the Board would determine the officers for the next two years.  In practice the Board itself interviewed the candidates and conducted the elections.  That means it was time to change the bylaws again. Section VII.2 and VII.3 spell out the process used to select the officers.  We use the phrase “Officer Appointment” to separate it from the Director election but the end result is that the Board elects the officers.  Section VII.3 starts: Officers shall be appointed bi-annually by a majority of all the voting members of the Board of Directors. Everything else revolves around that sentence.  We use the word appoint but they truly are elected.  There are details in the bylaws for term limits, minimum requirements for President (1 prior term as an officer), tie breakers and filling vacancies. In practice we will have an election for President, then an election for EVP and then an election for VP Marketing.  That means that losing candidates will be able to fall down the ladder and run for the next open position.  Another point to note is that officers aren’t at-large directors.  That means if a current sitting officer loses all three elections they are off the Board.  Having Board member votes public will help with the transparency of this approach. This process has a number of positive and negatives.  The biggest concern I expect to hear is that our members don’t directly choose the officers.  I’m going to try and list all the positives and negatives of this approach. Many non-profits value continuity and are slower to change than a business.  On the plus side this promotes that.  On the negative side this promotes that.  If we change too slowly the members complain that we aren’t responsive.  If we change too quickly we make mistakes and fail at various things.  We’ve been criticized for both of those lately so I’m not entirely sure where to draw the line.  My rough assumption to this point is that we’re going too slow on governance and too quickly on becoming “more than a Summit.”  This approach creates competition in the officer elections.  If you are an at-large director there is no consequence to losing an election.  If you are an officer the only way to stay on the Board is to win an officer election or an at-large election.  If you are an officer and lose an election you can always run for the next office down.  This makes it very easy for multiple people to contest an election. There is value in a person moving through the officer positions up to the Presidency.  Having the Board select the officers promotes this.  The down side is that it takes a LOT of time to get to the Presidency.  We’ve had good people struggle with burnout.  We’ve had lots of discussion around this.  The process as we’ve described it here makes it possible for someone to move quickly through the ranks but doesn’t prevent people from working their way up through each role. We talked long and hard about having the officers elected by the members.  We had a self-imposed deadline to complete these changes prior to elections this summer. The other challenge was that our original goal was to make the bylaws reflect our actual process rather than create a new one.  I believe we accomplished this goal. We ran out of time to consider this option in the detail it needs.  Having member elections for officers needs a number of problems solved.  We would need a way for candidates to fall through the election.  This is what promotes competition.  Without this few people would risk an election and we’ll be back to one candidate per slot.  We need to do this without having multiple elections.  We may be able to copy what other organizations are doing but I was surprised at how little I could find on other organizations.  We also need a way for people that lose an officer election to win an at-large election.  Otherwise we’ll have very little competition for officers. This brings me to an area that I think we as a Board haven’t done a good job.  We haven’t built a strong process to tell you who is doing a good job and who isn’t.  This is a double-edged sword.  I don’t want to highlight Board members that are failing.  That’s not a good way to get people to volunteer and run for the Board.  But I also need a way let the members make an informed choice about who is doing a good job and would make a good officer.  Encouraging Board members to blog, publishing minutes and making votes public helps in that regard but isn’t the final answer.  I don’t know what the final answer is yet.  I do know that the Board members themselves are uniquely positioned to know which other Board members are doing good work.  They know who speaks up in meetings, who works to build consensus, who has good ideas and who works with the members.  What I Could Do Better I’ve learned a lot writing this about how we communicated with our members.  The next time we revise the bylaws I’d do a few things differently.  The biggest change would be to provide better documentation.  The March 2009 minutes provide a very detailed look into what changes we wanted to make to the bylaws.  Looking back, I’m a little surprised at how closely they matched our final changes and covered the various arguments.  If you just read those you’d get 90% of what we eventually changed.  Nearly everything else was just details around implementation.  I’d also consider publishing a scope document defining exactly what we were doing any why.  I think it really helped that we had a limited, defined goal in mind.  I don’t think we did a good job communicating that goal outside the meeting minutes though. That said, I wish I’d blogged more after the August and January meeting.  I think it would have helped more people to know that this change was coming and to be ready for it. Conclusion These changes address two big concerns that the Board had.  First, it prevents a single organization from dominating the Board.  Second, it codifies and clearly spells out how officers are elected.  This is the process that was previously followed but it was somewhat murky.  These changes bring clarity to this and clearly explain the process the Board will follow. We’re going to listen to feedback until March 31st.  At that time we’ll decide whether to approve these changes.  I’m also assuming that we’ll start another round of changes in the next year or two.  Are there other issues in the bylaws that we should tackle in the future?

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  • How to prepare for a telephone interview: ‘Develop an Interview Cheat Sheet’

    - by Maria Sandu
    At Oracle we often do telephone interviews in different stages of the process with candidates, due to the fact that we hire native speakers into other countries. On this blog we already have an article with tips and tricks for phone interviews that can help you during the telephone interviews. To help you prepare even better for a telephone interview we would like to introduce you the basics of developing a cheat sheet. The benefit of a telephone interview is that you will be sitting at home, at your table or desk, during the interview, and not in front of someone. So use this to your advantage. The Monster website has some useful and interesting tips and tricks for developing a cheat sheet. Carole Martin, who wrote this article, says that a cheat sheet will help you feel more prepared and confident when speaking to managers over the phone. Important to keep in mind is that you shouldn't memorise what's on the sheet or check it off during the interview. Only use your cheat sheet to remind you of key facts. Here are some suggestions to include on it: • Divide a piece of paper in 2 by drawing a line. Write on one side of the paper a list of requirements as mentioned in the job description. On the other side list your qualities to fulfill the requirements of the employer. This will help you in answering questions about why you are the best candidate for the job and how you fit the role. • Do research on the company, the industry sector and the competitors, so you will get a feeling for the company’s business and can ask more in-depth questions. • Be prepared for the most used introduction question: “Tell me a bit about yourself”. Prepare a 60-second personal statement or pitch in which you summarise who you are and what you can offer, so you will be able to sell yourself from on the very beginning. • Write down a minimum of 5 good examples to answer behavioral interview questions ("Tell me about a time when..." or "Give me an example of a time..." ). These questions are used by interviewers to see how you deal with similar situations as you might encounter in the job. Interviewers use this question as past behaviour is scientifically proven to be the best predictor for future behaviour. • List five questions to ask the interviewer about the job, the company and the industry to help you get a good understanding if the role and company really fit your needs and wants. To get some inspiration check this article on inc.com • Find out how much you are worth on the job market and determine your needs based on your living expenses, especially when moving abroad. • Ask for permission from the people you plan to use as a reference. Also make sure you have your CV at hand and an overview of your grades. Feel free to comment on this article and let us know what your experience is with developing a cheat sheet for a telephone interview. Good luck with the preparation of your sheet.

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  • ORACLE is WEB 2.0

    - by anca.rosu
    You never know what to expect in life, where it can take you and what kind of fulfillment it can offer you. It’s just like an amazing lottery with millions of winning tickets. My name is Paula, I am an Online Marketing Specialist at Oracle University and this is my story. Having graduated from a technical profile college, it seemed almost normal to follow the same career path. But I said no. I wanted to try something else, so I took an Advertising Masters Program and I really became in love with this entire industry. Advertising and the new impact of the Internet through social networking is my current fascination. I knew I had to work to incorporate both my skills intro one dream job. I want to believe that I have come to work at Oracle as part of a great plan that life has for me. It’s not the most glamorous job in advertising or in the fashion industry, but it’s everything you need to start investing in your development and to build relationships. A normal day at work begins at 9.30 at our Oracle Office in Bucharest. After a short chit-chat, coffee and some conference calls, marketing gets to work! Some of the members of my team are working besides me but others are based all over Europe. This is extremely useful when coordinating the EMEA Marketing for Oracle University, because this way it’s easier to keep an eye on these various locations. Even though it’s a team play, you need to speak up and make your mark. I am the kind of person that never stands-by and waits to be given directions, I am curious and intuitive. This makes things easier. In Oracle you really need to find your own way and to discover how to organize your time and how to get involved with people. People to people, this is the focus. But everything is up to you and it strongly depends on the type of personality that you have. I try to get involved in various activities, participate in Oracle Days Events, interact and meet all kinds of people. For those who are newly graduates or interns, Oracle has lots of trainings and webcasts you can attend to help you develop your career shape and to understand better the way the business works. You can also be awarded for ideas and setting the trends so that makes it worth it. What I like most about my job is the fact that I can come with ideas and bring them to life. For example Oracle University has a special seminar program called “Celebrity Seminars” where top industry speakers teach 1-day or 2-day condensed seminars. We thought of creating something exclusive and a video was the best idea. So my colleague and I became reporters for a day and interviewed this well-known speaker regarding his seminar. I think this is a good way to market this business. Live footage is a very good marketing tool so we are planning to use the video to target our online audiences via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. This can even go in the newsletters that marketing sends regarding the Celebrity Seminars. This is what I meant when I said Oracle is a free spirited organization and you can surely find your place here among us. The best way to describe my job is WEB 2.0. The modern online approach comes to life while we are trying to sell our business. We need to be out there and we are responsible of spreading the buzz regarding our training offerings and our official courseware materials. There are so many new ways to interact with the target audience nowadays and I am so eager to discover the best online techniques! If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com Technorati Tags: WEB 2.0,Online Marketing,Oracle University,Bucharest,events,graduates,interns,training,webcast,seminar,newsletters,business,Facebook,Twitter,LinkedIn

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  • C#: A "Dumbed-Down" C++?

    - by James Michael Hare
    I was spending a lovely day this last weekend watching my sons play outside in one of the better weekends we've had here in Saint Louis for quite some time, and whilst watching them and making sure no limbs were broken or eyes poked out with sticks and other various potential injuries, I was perusing (in the correct sense of the word) this month's MSDN magazine to get a sense of the latest VS2010 features in both IDE and in languages. When I got to the back pages, I saw a wonderful article by David S. Platt entitled, "In Praise of Dumbing Down"  (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336129.aspx).  The title captivated me and I read it and found myself agreeing with it completely especially as it related to my first post on divorcing C++ as my favorite language. Unfortunately, as Mr. Platt mentions, the term dumbing-down has negative connotations, but is really and truly a good thing.  You are, in essence, taking something that is extremely complex and reducing it to something that is much easier to use and far less error prone.  Adding safeties to power tools and anti-kick mechanisms to chainsaws are in some sense "dumbing them down" to the common user -- but that also makes them safer and more accessible for the common user.  This was exactly my point with C++ and C#.  I did not mean to infer that C++ was not a useful or good language, but that in a very high percentage of cases, is too complex and error prone for the job at hand. Choosing the correct programming language for a job is a lot like choosing any other tool for a task.  For example: if I want to dig a French drain in my lawn, I can attempt to use a huge tractor-like backhoe and the job would be done far quicker than if I would dig it by hand.  I can't deny that the backhoe has the raw power and speed to perform.  But you also cannot deny that my chances of injury or chances of severing utility lines or other resources climb at an exponential rate inverse to the amount of training I may have on that machinery. Is C++ a powerful tool?  Oh yes, and it's great for those tasks where speed and performance are paramount.  But for most of us, it's the wrong tool.  And keep in mind, I say this even though I have 17 years of experience in using it and feel myself highly adept in utilizing its features both in the standard libraries, the STL, and in supplemental libraries such as BOOST.  Which, although greatly help with adding powerful features quickly, do very little to curb the relative dangers of the language. So, you may say, the fault is in the developer, that if the developer had some higher skills or if we only hired C++ experts this would not be an issue.  Now, I will concede there is some truth to this.  Obviously, the higher skilled C++ developers you hire the better the chance they will produce highly performant and error-free code.  However, what good is that to the average developer who cannot afford a full stable of C++ experts? That's my point with C#:  It's like a kinder, gentler C++.  It gives you nearly the same speed, and in many ways even more power than C++, and it gives you a much softer cushion for novices to fall against if they code less-than-optimally.  A bug is a bug, of course, in any language, but C# does a good job of hiding and taking on the task of handling almost all of the resource issues that make C++ so tricky.  For my money, C# is much more maintainable, more feature-rich, second only slightly in performance, faster to market, and -- last but not least -- safer and easier to use.  That's why, where I work, I much prefer to see the developers moving to C#.  The quantity of bugs is much lower, and we don't need to hire "experts" to achieve the same results since the language itself handles those resource pitfalls so prevalent in poorly written C++ code.  C++ will still have its place in the world, and I'm sure I'll still use it now and again where it is truly the correct tool for the job, but for nearly every other project C# is a wonderfully "dumbed-down" version of C++ -- in the very best sense -- and to me, that's the smart choice.

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  • Working and Studying in Oracle, how I balance my time....

    - by anca.rosu
    Hi, my name is Laura. I am working as an Intern within Executive Administration at Oracle Denmark, whilst studying Information Management at Copenhagen Business school. I have recently handeding a paper on Information Systems which gave me exposure to Oracle. Once completing this paper I came across a job posting on my University’s intranet site and I applied directly online. When I submitted my application for the job offer, I wondered about what language I should use for the application form, as the job posting was in Danish, but the contact person and number looked Irish. I therefore chose English. Later that same day, Fiona, one of Oracle’s Graduates Recruitment Consultants based in Ireland, contacted me. This shows how global Oracle truly is. I went for my face-to-face interview in Oracle Denmark with Charlotte, one of the team managers. I spent 5 minutes waiting in the lobby, just looking around, thinking to myself, I really want to work here. The atmosphere seemed so pleasant with a relaxed approach between colleagues, employees and guests. The interview took about an hour, but we touched on a lot of different subjects. The profile I got of Oraclewas that this is a place where you are encouraged to think for yourself, and you are given the freedom to use your ideas. Later that evening, Fiona called and offered me the job. I was very happy. At Oracle Denmark we have 4 different zones: a Quiet Zone, a Project Zone, a Dialogue Zone and a Call Zone. Everyday when you arrive you consider what will be the most productive for the day’s task, and you take your toolbox and go find a desk in the zone you have decided on. It is therefore very unusual to be next to the same person two days in a row. At Oracle, people are located all over the world, and everybody has team members, colleagues or leaders in other countries, or even other time zones. Initially,I was worried about how I would adapt to this approach but I soon realized I had nothing to worry about and now I appreciate working this way. My colleagues have been very supportive and they have openly welcomed me into my new role. I typically work two days a week and have three days at University. During exam periods, I have the flexibility to work less hours and focus on the exams, in return for putting in more hours at work when needed. The first time I had to ask for time off before handing in a paper, my boss looked at me and said, ”Of course! Your education is the most important!” I hope that by sharing my experiences with you, I can inspire or encourage you to consider Oracle as a potential employer, where you can grow both professionally and personally. If you have any questions related to this article feel free to contact  [email protected].  You can find our job opportunities via http://campus.oracle.com Technorati Tags: Intern,Oracle Denmark,Information Systems,Business school,Copenhagen,Graduates Recruitment,Ireland,Quiet Zone,Project Zone,Dialogue Zone,Call Zone,University,flexibility

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