It's amazing how fast you can get tired in a situation where you're going all out
This is a point that gets overlooked far too often. I have seen plenty of people in peak physical fitness run out of steam after 2 to 3 minutes.
What most people forget is that as well as physical exertion your body releases a massive amount of adrenaline the second a punch is thrown and that wipes you out. It's called an adrenaline dump and it honestly feels like your legs have turned to jelly and you feel like you have zero power behind your punches.
I've lived & worked in Ireland, New Zealand and the UK and I can categorically say that the UK online banking system is by far the worst.
My biggest issue is the time delay between making a purchase and that purchase reflecting on your account. The EFTPOS system in NZ is incredible. Almost all transactions are reflected within an hour on your account.
I think a lot of my issues are probably specific to my current bank so forgive me if this doesn't apply to the company you work for but one thing that really winds me up is that I have to physically attend a branch if I want to print of an official statement. On my online account I can print off a list of transactions but only after the transactions have been exported to an excel worksheet.
How hard is it to pop up a PDF document with the banks header & footer and my transactions in between that I can print off on the spot?
I'm surprised this hadn't had more attention here!
APPLE-1 -- Personal Computer. An Apple-1 motherboard, number 82, printed label to reverse, with a few slightly later additions including a 6502 microprocessor, labeled R6502P R6502-11 8145, printed circuit board with 4 rows A-D and columns 1-18, three capacitors, heatsink, cassette board connector, 8K bytes of RAM, keyboard interface, firmware in PROMS, low-profile sockets on all integrated circuits, video terminal, breadboard area with slightly later connector, with later soldering, wires and electrical tape to reverse, printed to obverse Apple Computer 1 Palo Alto. Ca. Copyright 1976
The designers of some elevators include a hidden feature that is very handy if you’re in a hurry or it’s a busy time in the building (like check-out time in a hotel). While some elevators require a key, others can be put into 'Express' mode by pressing the 'Door Close' and 'Floor' buttons at the same time. This sweeps the car to the floor of your choice and avoids stops at any other floor.
27 here. I thought I would do better to be honest. I make a pretty decent amount of pocket money playing poker and I consider my biggest strength to be my ability to read people in an incredibly short period of time. Then again, I am a bit of an arrogant git.
Part of the reason agencies command such high fee's is because of the influence their brand & network has with candidates. There are thousands of self employed recruiters fighting over the scraps and a lot of highly successful self-employed recruiters earning a mint by utilising the personal network they have cultivated from being in the business for many years. I personally haven't been in the game long enough to be able to rely on my own contacts to build a business.
An employer is willing to pay an extra 20% to save themselves the time and effort of having to source & interview the hundreds of applications themselves.
As for recruiters taking 20%, that's a comparitively low figure for such a high daily rate. If one of my clients was requesting a £500 a day calibre candidate I wouldn't touch it for anything less than 30% in reality.
We are providing a service, plain and simple. The service fee is calculated in relation to the calibre of candidate as the more senior the candidate, the more difficult they are to find.
Assume that my example is based on a recruiter working for a specialist agency in London. I'll base my estimate on that:
Salary of £60k would probably give you a fee of about £15k meaning the total charge to the client would be about £75k, probably a bit more but you get the drift.
From that £15k fee, the recruiters cut would vary based on his companies bonus structure which is generally based on overall fee's per quarter as opposed to individual placements.
Assuming an average performance per quarter (slightly ahead of predefined targets) a recruiter would probably take home around a grand for that placement.
A general rule in recruitment is that you aim to take home at least the equivalent of your salary in bonus every year. I've worked with guys who were earning in excess of £120k a year after about 3 to 5 years with the same recruitment company.
As for quantity, this once again varies from agency to agency. I have what I consider to be a busy desk and I have 8 open, fillable vacancies in front of me right now and they will be workable for about a week at a time.
Most of the time, recruiters end up being recruiters just because they failed at everything else.
Ouch. You cut me deep koevet.
In reference to point 6, allow me to dispell a myth here.
Let's say I am approached by a client who is looking for someone to do XYZ for three months and they want to pay the candidate £500 per day (nice round number).
If you are the candidate, I don't then offer you £400 a day and take 20%. I pay you £500 per day and charge the client in excess of £600. Every client knows that if they want a £500 a day candidate it will actually cost them a hell of a lot more than that to employ them through an agency.
Sometimes, if I have an amazing candidate who has been offered a job but is stalling because the money may not be as high as they would like, if the client won't pay more, instead I would lump another £25 per day to their take home and walk away with 15% instead of 20% but that very rarely happens.
TL;DR: We do not take our % out of your salary. We add our % on top of your salary and charge the client.
You can't. My industry is driven by one thing only, money.
Recruiters get paid incredible bonuses for placing candidates and are less interested in how you feel and more interested in ticking off keywords fed to them by their client.
Example: One role I have on my books right now is for a 3rd line support analyst. My colleague, a guy who makes about £50k to £60k, submitted a candidate who he listed out the tech requirements to and asked the candidate to answer 'Yes' or 'No' if he had exposure to those systems/languages. No probing questions, no challenge of his competencies, no understanding of what the various languages were but purely and simply ticked the boxes.
People like him are the norm so when I get on the phone and ask the same guy to explain the difference between powershell and the command prompt and why the powershell is more advanced, a straightforward question for a techie but not what you expect from a recruiter, it throws him for six and those who know what they are talking about stand out from that point forward.
tl;dr Recruiters suck and only care about arbitrary bullshit.
This statement acurately describes 95% of my colleagues.
I will happily accept the challenge of changing your perception of our industry. I'm a technical recruiter that covers the London market. Feel free to send me your CV. My details are in my profile. Also, feel free to have a look through my comment history. I'm not on this site to pick up leads or push for business, I'm here because I have a legitimate interest in the industry and I find that HN is a fantastic gauge as to the pulse of the industry.
With all due respect, this much is blatantly obvious but not necessarily the key to giving him a head start.
My father loved me unconditionally and I can't think of a single moment of my childhood where I ever questioned his love for me but with that said, my childhood was a mess. I sincerely struggled at school, I lacked any decent social skills and I was incredibly naïve when it came to how the world worked.
Whilst I'm happy that I've overcome these obstacles, I can think of plenty my father could have done to counter-act them in the first place.
Like every other father (and mother) that participates in this community, I would move mountains for my boy. I would happily lay my own life on the line to protect him and the question I initially asked was based on the assumption that the basic fundamentals of being a good parent were a given.
Now that those bases are covered, what can I do to ensure that he is at least one step ahead of the average kid growing up in a world where technology develops at an incredible rate and those who embrace this change storm ahead of the mean?
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I personally think this is pretty good advice.
I never really excelled academically yet I became quite succeessful through pure hard work. Unfortunately I got a lot of bad advice as a kid and it was drilled into me that I would never be as successful as 'smart' people. Had I known that I could counter-act my disadvantage with pure grunt work then I probably would have been more successful from a younger age.
Logic & reason are the foundation for almost everything we are hoping to teach him but as far as technology is concerned we really want to encourage him to understand how things work as well as how to use them so I suppose that is what drove me to seek the opinion of the HN collective.
This is a point that gets overlooked far too often. I have seen plenty of people in peak physical fitness run out of steam after 2 to 3 minutes.
What most people forget is that as well as physical exertion your body releases a massive amount of adrenaline the second a punch is thrown and that wipes you out. It's called an adrenaline dump and it honestly feels like your legs have turned to jelly and you feel like you have zero power behind your punches.
Moral of the story; hit hard and be accurate.