At the risk of feeding a troll, are you seriously saying that society is suffering because developers give stuff away? If so, you really need to take another look at the world get your priorities adjusted.
Open source developers create free systems and building blocks for people to build business and other applications on top of. They lower the barrier of entry for new, money making ideas to come into the light and get a shot, rather than having the high barriers to entry that used to exist.
They also force continual innovation on the commercial software front - most things widely popular and commercial software will end up with reasonable, or often better, open source counterparts in some amount of time. (This applies more to underlying building blocks than finished products - there isn't a great market for an open-source alternative to Visio or Office - yes, we have dia and openoffice and a few others, but Office is still king. The main reason is, these aren't really building blocks that lead to more things - they are just continual maintenance nightmares for their vendors.
A browser, on the other hand, like firefox, was a HUGE undertaking, and was sub-standard for a long time, then it surpassed everyone, raised the bar, and caused everyone else out there to start amping up their browser strategy. If anyone falls behind in innovating and optimizing the browser as a useful, open platform, firefox will take up the slack.
The whole thing didn't 'smell right to me' and when I read some time ago that it might have been a prank it became more obvious that this is where the stench emanated from...
I am truly surpised by the rigidness displayed regarding Word docs. Limiting opportunities in your life because an HR department uses the most common document app in the world seems self-defeating. Why not rule out cmapanies that use a certain type of printer paper?
I have no problems with whatever document app the HR team is using. If they send me a doc file, I will read the information contained therein. In creating a document the author puts in more work than the reader; so as long as the format is not too onerous the author should be able to choose whatever tool is convenient to him/her.
I hope that you agree that txt and pdf files are just as convenient formats to read as doc ones. IMHO it is irritating when someone insists that any document you send them should be in the format of the application they write documents with.
Furthermore, these are no absolutes. If the State asks me to send a document in doc format, I will. Despite pretenses, these companies (and HR depts) are not Republic of Greater Timbuktu really - so I will skip, thank you. :)
Bayesian filtering that works both ways. In fact we currently take PDF/Word/txt/RTF at my job. I'd actual considering narrowing it down to just Word. The type of person who decides that they don't want to submit in Word is probably a type of person that's not a good cultural fit. And I guess we've already ruled out those that prefer to send their resume via smoke signals only.
As an employer it is more important to find good cultural fits than it is as an employee, since it is typically easier for employees to leave than it is to fire them.
My CV is a PDF because I made it in LaTeX. I did that because .doc is not a standardised format, does not make the promise to look right on any system, and doesn't support some of the nicer typesetting I have going on. In my opinion, forcing people to use a proprietary locked-down format is the kind of thing that should be fought. What really gets my goat is that most of these places still don't accept .docx, even though it is standardised, well-supported, and absolutely TRIVIAL to pull plaintext out of for indexing purposes.
However, because I took the initiative to teach myself an industry standard text markup language in order to make a CV that looks really nice and will always display and print properly (and is distributed in the most widely-agreed upon document format for that purpose), you want to exclude me? I'm not submitting in PDF to be difficult or to take a stance, it's a convenient, standardised and well supported format which I am using for its intended purpose.
Comparing smoke signals to PDF is completely disingenuous, as is bundling together "people who happen to submit their CV to you as a PDF" and "people who would flat-out refuse to submit their CV as a .doc".
I don't want to send my resume as a Word document because I wrote it in LaTeX, and it looks correct as a PDF. I don't understand why you wouldn't do me the courtesy of accepting the PDF.
This seems like a good cultural filter to me (on both sides).
I wouldn't rule out an employer for this, but it's annoying.
I use Ubuntu at home. As someone who will need to work with Ubuntu Server at work, I think that's a good thing for my employability. Using Microsoft Word in Ubuntu is not an option for me.
So it's a Giant Pain in the Butt to produce a Word-formatted resume (no, OpenOfice and Google Docs don't make it reliably look good), and there's no reason they need that because they're not going to edit it.
On the other hand, it's easy for me to produce a PDF, which will look better anyway, and it can be done using the OS I will be using at the job I'm applying for.
Being told, effectively, "we require you to install Windows so that you can submit a nice-looking resume for this job working with Unix" is annoying. It's a small factor in how interested I am in the job, but a factor nonetheless, because it shows (to me) that technical people are not running the company.
I think there's a place for a Renaissance man; I fancy myself a fledgling. But the Renaissance man of yore was independently wealthy, or engaged in a profitable enterprise not accessible to the mundanes: the combination of useful breadth and interesting depth requires resources both temporal and monetary.
So to focus on a largely dull, specialized and marketable education in one's youth is no sin. It allows the development of that depth later on.
There is room for abstract math and creative writing and painting and essay writing, but they should be a side dish to the main course of "Getting Shit Done."
I've always said that becoming a generalist is a two-step process:
1. Become a specialist
2. Become a generalist
Step one is important because it gives you a useful and marketable skill to support yourself while you're working on step two, but also because it means you understand what it really means to be an expert on something. This gives you some humility and perspective when you start attacking all the other domains of human knowledge.
Unfortunately, in terms of learning the same proportions of the total sum of knowledge as the old renaissance men, attaining real renaissance personhood is impossible at current life spans. Boosting learning velocity/capacity/efficieny should help. Why must we replay histroy when teaching? But maybe we are not doing such a good job at consolidating/compressing knowledge as we used to since there is so much. A scaling problem, the entropy per bit of data is decreasing, we are increasing the total number of bits of data in our knowledge at a much higher rate than we are its entropy.
Now it is such that you are a generalist if you have peripheral knowledge of related sub sub fields of your sub field of expertize in some sub section of a topic.
> Boosting learning velocity/capacity/efficieny should help. Why must we replay histroy when teaching? But maybe we are not doing such a good job at consolidating/compressing knowledge as we used to since there is so much.
I think we are boosting our learning capacity and efficiency by better understanding how our minds work, and how this giant web of knowledge that we have created can be simplified. I'm absolutely dumbstruck that we still teach the majority of children using the same methods used for at least a hundred years, despite the (information) world being a completely different place than it was even a decade ago.
