Sir Sidney Ruff-Diamond

You've found an ethical estate agent? The original name is Abergwaun. Pembrokeshire has its gentry of course - only you probably wouldn't think of them that way, because every Friday night they get off their tractors and go to The Brynawelon or into Haverforwest to fight or grope unsuspecting (but not altogether unwilling) local girls.

Indeed. By the way youthoftoday, good coders spend most of their time commenting code rather than writing the code. But you knew that, right? Of course you did .

This should be a reasonable enough argument (apart from the fact that most of the best programmers I've met never studied maths beyond A level or GCSE in some cases), the problem is that you assume that the person interviewing them will always be better at maths than the candidate. This is usually wrong of course. But you and your boss should know better, right? So how good is your maths? Let see! (we'll start off with some really basic problems) Express 2/7 as a percentage. Show your working. Two badminton players. One is better at playing than the other. If they play 7 games rather than 9, who will likely benefit, and why? In a group of 128 male students, if there is a 60% chance that one of them is an engineer, and a 20% chance that one of them is a philatelist, what is the probability of finding a philatelist engineer among them? Is it probabilistically likely or unlikely that you have breathed the same air as the biblical Emperor Nero did? Why? P.S. If you decline or to answer these question, or ignore them youthoftoday, it will show that you are talking utter ********. That wouldn't be a surprise to many here though ...

Already happening over here. Unemployed Polish living in tents next to riverbank

We shag em, you eat em. Tuck in, lamb for dinner! Actually I know some long term residents in Fishguard - a few of the estate agents have large "REDUCED" stickers they are putting on boards now. You must be joking. They are almost as lazy, disinterested and workshy as their fatter and uglier UK counterparts.

I've I'd done it in perl, it would have just been a single, long line of code .

Absolutely. This is the real issue. The boss doesn't want his incompetence unmasked.

The basic stuff I meant was that it is basic in programming terms. A high performance reporting application I wrote in C++ and Crystal Reports was over a 500,000 lines of code, with over 230 classes. That's complex. Well, I'm glad for your sake that you understand this issue in advance. The problem with electronics is that the opportunities have long since moved abroad. My father is an IET Fellow, my older brother an EE doctorate working for a multinational, and if they graduated today, they would not have the same opportunities that were available then. If its any consolation, computer science is little better in terms of job security and rewards. It is part of a much wider malaise in the UK. There is a persistent idea in the UK that the 'tecchies' deal with detail, but the loud-mouthed generalists are the one really doing the work! Expertise is a dirty word in the UK.

You and your boss are assuming the motivation for the candidate to become a contractor was money. Personally I became a contractor by accident - I never intended it to happen, but the area where I was working was so specialized that very few companies had a requirement to hire someone full time to do it. In the end though, I think we're all agreed it comes down to this - if your boss doesn't need the skills listed on contractors' CVs and can find those skills in full time employees instead, then obviously the skills he requires are not that much in demand, or not that specialized (this still leaves us with the paradox that if a full time employee can do the job just as well or better than a contractor, the contractor wouldn't have any work, so wouldn't exist! Something doesn't quite add up there and I think I smell the little green envy monster in you youthoftoday) Electronics doesn't cover coding. Not even half of it. If you mean the basic procedural firmware programming, then fine but that won't help you to create an object-oriented multi-threaded workflow system. And BTW good luck getting a job with electronics. That stuff you are doing in the lab is very basic compared to a modern commercial lab. Do you speak Mandarin BTW? Willing to relocate to Taiwan for $3 an hour?

Sue, you need to seek professional legal advice, which we are not here. It sounds to me as if a magistrate would be symapthetic, because it sounds as if you've been treated badly. I don't even understand why they are taking you to court when you appear to given them all the money they want! It sounds more like you should be taking them to court to recover that money. You could try the Citizens Advice Bureau too. This sounds a bit too complicated to sort out via an online forum though.

Good job you're not an Analyst from Scunthorpe.

Well this is how you weed out the serious hirers from the ones who just want someone to make them look good at what they do by hiring less able people than them. Such people are utter timewasters, and generally avoided by both recruitment agencies and potential employees alike. If the person's skills fit, it *really actually* shouldn't matter if they are 91 or 19. Me too - contractor for one of the largest tech consultancies in Europe. They've shed their engineers and kept lots of their sales staff - even though the sales staff were the ones not doing their jobs well enough . The engineers are emigrating because they are at the top of their game (the domestic demand environment can't sustain them) and they can simply follow the money, which right now is elsewhere. Hmm. Your boss assumes that the skills he requires are either easily available or quickly learnable. If that was the case, then by definition, a contractor would not be needed! By the time a full time employee has learned to do it, the contractor is already ahead ... oddly by approximately the same amount of time the full timer has been on the case . youthoftady, you almost certainly just happen to be in an industry or a company that does not require highly skilled IT people. Nothing wrong with that - I worked in retail IT for a while, and that was largely the same (but I did get out after a while because the money was rubbish). Now that is interesting. I'm a certified Risk Management Practitioner and I know that whole industry inside out. I'm looking to do something no-one else has done in this area, so I'll PM you?

Indeed. his cooking might be lovely, but his delivery needs working on.

[$sysadmin@home~]rm -rf hope

Ed Balls is permanently in smug git mode. Did he really actually say that?

Did anyone else notice the prevalence of ads for advertising? I've seen them on Virgin channel and on Dave I think. You know, the equivalent of "This advertising slot reaches six trillion people every second - why aren't you using it etc." That's a sign of the times.

I think the CPI is about to show a rise.

What's a D-notice?

If the cooker switches itself on automatically, there could be a health and safety issue. Is there a letting agent involved? If so, complain to them first. If not, your options could be a bit more limited. Did you ask for a 6-month break in the contract, or are you there for a 12 month stretch? Have you tried telling the landlord that you don't want to stay there, and why?

Don't believe a bit of what the agent is saying - IT'S A TRAP They are squeezing appointments together in the diary to take the afternoon off and install a sense of urgency in potential buyers. Think about it - what would you do if buyers were thin on the ground? A common trick right now.

There is always some truth in this - we should never forget that Mervyn King has always tried to shape expectations when he says something. All their braying about "Yes, we're going to switch on the printing presses. Right now. Yes. Anytime soon now" is about scaring savers into buying depreciating assets. Wrong headed, morally questionable and socially unjust. Par for the course for the Bank of England's policy makers.

You're talking about governments imposing wealth confiscation there. There would be blood on the streets if either of those scenarios were allowed to happen. I for one, would be the first to take a leisurely stroll down the Shell garage with a milkcrate full of pint bottles to fill up.

Nope. Not me. I'm an unextraordinary Gen'X'er - overqualified, underemployed. I'm not underpaid though, sorry . Whatever, love. I did later say that my issue is less with OAPs, more with the Thatcher Generation. Yes, I put you in the same boat, but it was only a metaphor and you're no longer in there so cheer up dear. Take a chill pill.

Hmm. What do you think is the purpose of online petitions? To allow the people to make their voices heard? Or for the incompetent government to harvest ideas for reform?