Monday, February 22, 2016

So far Windows 10 has been a big thorn in my side

I started with my main PC - an i5 with 16g of RAM. Hand built box with a newer nVidia graphics card. I upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10. Had to find one off drivers from my sound card but got that working.

Then I made the mistake of using the MS website to order an Xbox One for my sons for Christmas. MS switched my login to use that account. I did NOT want that to happen. Then my network card got confused and it could not see the internet so I could not log in. After many hours of screwing around with way too many tools I finally was able to create a different admin account, get the network working again and then log back into my main account with the MS website password. I was hating Windows 10 at this point and I wasted way too many hours.

I got my sons machine, that was on Windows 8.1, upgraded next. Another pain. Everything was working until yesterday. This is also a hand built machine. Now I just get a black screen with the basic white mouse cursor running about. Tried for a couple of hours yesterday to get that resolved but no such luck. Might have to reinstall I don't know.

My wife's parents installed Windows 10 on their box and then lost the ability to talk to their Android phone and Kodak camera. This is a refurbished eMachine from Microcenter. I was able to get things back up and running by doing some manual driver installs. Still don't trust everything but it is working for now. Also a Windows 7 upgrade that was an upgrade from Vista. The main menu was broken on this machine until I uninstalled drop box and reinstalled it. Took hours to figure that out as well.

Looked up my wife's Lenovo laptop and it is recommended that you DO NOT upgrade this box as you will lose sound. They just are not going to do drivers for it. Since I have had all the other issues really wanted to skip this box too.

A friend upgraded her newer Lenovo laptop to Windows 10 and then brought it to me as it was all screwed up. I upgraded every thing I could on the machine, mainly Lenovo drivers, and got it back in shape. Since then it has been working OK for her, fingers crossed.

Not doing either of my son's laptops. Older laptops and he attends a virtual school so having them down would be a huge hassle. They will be left alone until they die. Both on Windows 7 at this time and they run just fine using that.

Finally I am skipping the family file / print server. Windows 7 on another refurbished eMachine. Just as stated it is file / printer server that does M-W-F backups to an external HD. Everyone stores everything out there so you can use any machine in the house to get to things. It also needs to be running at all times. Not going to risk Win 10 screwing that up.

I just can't recommend Win 10 as an existing machine upgrade. Yes, once I got it going on my main PC it has been fine. I do think MS is being way to snoopy with this update as well. I disabled all the call home stuff I could on all the machines that I did upgrade. But I keep running in to new issues. Have to get my son's machine out of black screen of cursor only mode. Did the boot from physical media and tried to get it to repair things but no luck there yet even. Lots of posts about this issue, some get it fixed, others do not.

You will have something broken. It will take you hours to figure it out. You will cuss and scream at all of this. Sure Win 10 is fine on a new machine but upgrading has been very painful and I now I have a machine that is down again. Plan on cussing at it tonight some more trying to get it back to life. I will not risk any more machines in my house and I have warned all family and close friends to not update and just to ride out Windows 7 until they get a new machine.

Friday, February 5, 2016

Headhunters, can't live without them, can't get them to stop asking inane questions

I get contacted by head hunters / recruiters / talent hunters at least once a week. A lot of it is blanket emails from LinkedIn but some from local folks I have worked with in the past. I am not looking for a job so this is all cold calls hoping like heck you want to change positions.

Head hunters need to clean up how they perform cold calls. Yes, some time in the past I have done Basic, Delphi, Clipper, C/C++, C# and other languages but I have not really touched them in the past 5 years. It is silly to approach me for a job where the company is looking for a Delphi programmer. I doubt they want to talk to someone who used it for a few months 7 years ago. Keyword searches without also using a timeframe context is a waste of everyones time.

Quotas are stupid. I work remote so I don't drive any place during the day. I can tell a head hunter that I am not looking for a job but they want to take me out for coffee anyway. Why? They can write it off and hit some "talked to a developer quota" they have. Why would I take time off work to do that? When I was looking I did have lunch with a few head hunters so I could give them a better idea of what I was looking for and to get a feel for the current job market.

When I was looking to change jobs I had one head hunter try to send me to interviews to up her count. She did not care about me or the company that was looking to hire. I was told the name of the company and I knew it totally underpaid for the area. They have been advertising for senior level C# developers for same salary for years. Second it was C# which I had not touched in years and I specifically told her I was only interested in mobile work. She was getting mad at me for not wasting my time - it would have been a $35k a year pay cut in a language I was not interested in doing. She said it would give me interview practice. What? Totally waste my time and their time but she got a notch in some ledger for trying. I told her the other company would be mad at her for even sending me over. They probably pull 2 or 3 people out of important work to talk to me. She called me back a few days later to apologize but I will never work with her or the firm she represents ever again.

It may sound cool to get approached by five head hunters in a week. Looking at it logically you can easily see a pattern. There is one job opening and they are all trying to fill it. A business in the area first attempted to fill it using internal HR staff. When that did not work they reached out to a few trusted firms. Once those did not pan out they shot gunned the head hunter pool. Now they all want to fill this position. Do you know why it is open? Because the hiring company has a bad reputation in town. Either they under pay or they have a less than stellar work environment.

I have been called to fill a position I previously had. Listed right on my resume and on LinkedIn. I left for a good reason and don't want to go back. Not that I have burned a bridge, just would not work there again. When they call they give me some generic "local company in the financial industry" and I say "Is it Company X" and they fully admit it is. Tell them I worked there before and I know the person who left leaving this vacancy. They tell me management changed since I left and I inform them yes, it changed for the worse as my buddy who just left filled me in on the current set of issues.

It is pretty easy to get a bad reputation in town as it really is a small developer community which is even smaller when you are dealing with mobile developers. Once you have a bad name you are not going to get primo talent again. I let the head hunters know they are going to need to reach outside the area to find someone.

Which brings us to another point. If you get called about an out of town position guess what happened? They have scared off all the local talent so they are reaching farther out. Since I have been watching this pattern locally I would be really scared to take a job in another area of the country. Company either underpays and you don't understand the local economy to know that or they have a crappy environment. Either way you need to run away from them. If you are a novice developer just looking to get into the business it might not be a bad idea to get some experience under you belt but if you have experience it probably is not a good idea.