I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a manager complain, “The HR department included ‘must have college degree’ in the job req even though I don’t care” or “They asked for 5 years of experience in a technology that’s only been around for 3” or “I have no idea why they rejected this candidate without even contacting me.”

Still, in many cases you don’t have a choice. If you want to hire someone, you need to deal with HR, at least to a small degree – especially if you work in a big company.

So I’m writing a feature story for technology managers, collecting real-world advice from people who learned their lessons the hard way. Here’s the questions I’d like you to answer:

• Tell me about a frustration you had with the HR department (in regard to hiring). That is, tell me a personal story of HR-gone-wrong. Because we all love schadenfreude, and that gives me an emotional example with which to begin.
• Let’s say you have a new opening in your department. In what ways do you involve HR? (That could be anything from, “give them general guidelines and let them choose the best candidates for me to interview” to “I do the search myself, and use HR only for on-boarding.”) What makes you choose that path? How much choice do you have in the matter?
• What weaknesses have you discovered in your HR department’s ability to serve the needs of a tech-focused department?
• What have you done to cope with those weaknesses? Which of those efforts worked, and which failed?
• What do you wish you knew “n” years ago about dealing with your company’s HR department?
• So that I can give the reader some context: Let me know how to refer to you in the article (at least, “Esther, a software architect at a Midwest insurance company”), and give me some idea of your company size (because the processes appropriate for a 70-person company aren’t the same for one with 7,000 employees).

You don’t have to answer all those questions! I asked these to get the conversation going. Tell me as much or as little as you like.

Please don’t assume that I think HR always sucks. However, there isn’t as much to learn from “why HR is your friend.” The idea here is to help techie managers cope when HR doesn’t offer what you hoped for.

I'm currently researching the cheapest off site backup system and it looks like leaving a hdd at a friends house is the best option. The only thing I am stuck on is how to access it remotely. I need a system on a chip that I can plug in to the hdd and Ethernet and that provides ssh access. My first thought was a raspberry pi with a sata to usb cable but since I will only be doing weekly backups it makes no sense to keep the drive spinning 24/7. I need some way to turn off the drive and then back on over the internet. From what I understand there are linux programs that can do it but only directly over sata because the command doesn't work on usb sata controllers.

What I need is a cheap linux SoC that has sata and ethernet. Does anyone have any ideas?

If you have built from source, then you know the relief when nothing interesting comes out of ./configure && make && make install. In fact, the less interesting the output of these commands, the better.

But occasionally, the source build process is so horrifying that you end up having to modify the configure script or makefile yourself.

So far I have only been able to do this when I was lucky enough to find some poor, destitute stranger who had pretty much the same problem as me ( most recent I can think of is GNUTLS, where I had to adjust the version requirements for nettle ) and that is a problem -- there must be some way to learn this myself.

Is this just something that comes with time and experience, or does anyone have a reliable guide or resource for modifying makefiles and configure scripts? I would appreciate advice / discussion: I am tired of "getting lucky" with these!

I was looking for preferences on 120/140mm case fans. RGB is a want, but not at the expense of quality fans.

I'm pretty new to the topic and not super familiar with the technical side. So open to reading more in depth too.

Thanks!

Mostly the title. I have experience with Python, and I was thinking of learning more about data compression. How should I proceed? And what are some good books I could read, both about specifics and abstracts of data compression, data management, data in general.

I am looking for any resource that could tell me how much knowledge and training is needed to go from a beginner to expert, in let's say application software development for example. Or in artificial intelligence.

If there isn't any one source, are there any general type of sources I can use to piece together one mega-source?

Hi,

There's a certain site which hosts media files and has a player that depends on a lot of third-party resources to play, while browsers have native support for those file types. Those 3rd-party resources are often blocked by ad blockers and I have no desire to white-list them. I would like to extract the direct link to the media file and make it playable on my custom web page.

The link to the media file is present in the page source of each page, always on the same line. It's not anchored in HTML but present in the JavaScript for the player, like so:

    $(document).ready(function(){
      $("#jquery_jplayer_1").jPlayer({
        ready: function () {
          $(this).jPlayer("setMedia", {
            [ext]: "https://[domain]/[filename.ext]"
          });
        },

In this example it's on line #5. [ext] = the file extension.

I want to build the following:

• A web page with a form with a single input field meant to receive links from that specific file host
• [Something] that extracts the file link from the source of the host's page
• Present the linked file as playable in an embedded native player

So far I've managed to create a form with an input box and a submit button, but it doesn't do anything yet. What is the best way to build the actual functionality? I know HTML/CSS. I have some rudimentary understanding of JavaScript/jQuery and Python3, so those would be my preferred tools.

For those worried about piracy: The files in question are not copyrighted and I'm not looking to make copies. I just want to make them playable. This is for personal use.

Thank you for reading this far. Any and all advice is welcome!

Hey everyone, I've decided to start studying to get my CCNA. My books are showing up Monday and I'm really excited.

I'm going to shoot for self studying and prep for the testing. I think I can do it as I've always thrived in a more self paced learning environment (I also have no money for the classes).

I'm just wondering if anyone has any tips, supplemental material, etc they could recommend? What was hardest for you and what was easiest? What did you spend too much time studying and what didn't you spend enough time on?