December 2007 Archives

This is my last post for 2007. I haven’t been posting much recently because I’m enjoying every minute of my two-week holiday break, and I’m spending most of it as far away from a computer as I can.

I wrapped up my past semester. It’s been a great year, and a great semester. I made the switch from work to grad school for a year, and I accomplished most things in school that I wanted to accomplish. I can be proud of my results so far.

I’m continuing for the first eight months of 2008 in my Master of Human-Computer Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon. I do not yet know what happens after that in Q3 and Q4, but this will become more clear over the next weeks and months. Drop me a line if you have suggestions or ideas

A friend asked me several months ago…

you should do a big old long blog post about your change of life
what was as exected, what wasn’t, what is better, what is worse etc…
I’m just curious … you’re doing what many people want to do but dont dare to do …
what’s been easier than expected, more difficult than expected, what’s most different what isn’t different… etc

I put off the post for several months for two reasons. One is that I simply had no time to physically sit down and write it up. The other, more important one was that I wanted to be more into the semester, so that I would have more insight and time to contemplate about this. But lo and behold, the semester came to end and with the end of year approaching fast, it’s actually a good time to wrap up the past semester.

There’s clearly a tradeoff with putting off writing up the post. Some of the earlier things I thought about are not as salient as they used to be. But I guess this just gives more space to the stuff that’s really worth remembering from the semester.

I don’t really know what’s the best way to organize this. I’ll just put down some themes and elaborate on them.

Tonight, Estonia and other countries become part of the Schengen area. Internal border controls are abolished on land and sea borders, so you can travel across Europe without anybody checking your documents at all. (Kind of like you can drive all across the US freely.)

This move has both practical and symbolic meaning. In the practical sense, travelling in Europe becomes easier — although it doesn’t really matter that much. I’ve driven across Eastern Europe several times over the past few years and the border controls didn’t consist of anything more than the official simply glancing quickly at your document and there were no queues for border crossing — except for trucks, whose queues were at times quite long and even a traffic safety hazard at some border crossings (like from Lithuania to Poland). So for trucking industry, life becomes indeed easier. And for all other drivers, just more convenient.

For me, the symbolic meaning of this news is much more significant than the practical part. It means that we are now much closer to a unified Europe and forgetting this “old/new Europe” antagonism. There are still obstacles, such as some countries not fully opening their labor market, and silly obstacles to free provision of services across the EU. But abolishing internal border controls is a great step forward.

I was somewhat sceptical to Schengen coming to Estonia, it seemed one of those things that’s going to happen in some distant unperceivable future. So I was overjoyed when I learned earlier this year that we are joining the Schengen area already in the end of 2007. A nice way to end the year — and hopefully an inspiration to all Europeans to keep building Europe’s future together in 2008 and beyond.

It’s not really visible, but I did a big change to the backend of this blog: I upgraded to Movable Type 4.

I’ve been wanting to rework this site for a while and upgrading was the first part of this process. It let me throw out a lot of old junk that this site has accumulated in its backend, such as some obscure plugins, and instead have only the core code. The only plugin I have is for creating smileys, and I had to rewrite this just a tiny bit, and now all is good again

One of the strange aspects of practical life in Pittsburgh is that weather here can fluctuate much more and much faster than I am used to. Just last week, I posted pictures of snow, as there was indeed a proper snowfall with subzero Celsius temperatures.

And yet the temperature since then has gone up by 20C. I kid you not. It’s 15C or higher outside — well not all the time, but at certain moments. We can walk outside without winter coats. Just last night we were standing on the street, drinking beer in T-shirts. This is something that I would expect to do, say, at a London pub somewhere in August or September, not on the US east coast in the middle of December especially considering that other states have severe winter weather at this time.

This is not necessarily to pick on Apple, but it’s just one of the companies whose products and business I’m interested in. And this post is to highlight how Apple discriminates by age when hiring. The purpose of this post is to illustrate how ethical standards are flexible across regions and if someone is telling you that they’re an ethical business, that has in most cases extra qualifiers to it like geography that the statement applies to and what criteria for “ethical” are being used.

In the US, explicitly discriminating by age is not really that common, is it? Short of saying “illegal”. But apparently it’s perfectly fine in other regions.

Here’s a screenshot from Apple’s US retail hiring page.

Note the part at the bottom that says…

We are committed to diversity. Apple is an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action Employer.

And here’s a job ad for an Apple retail consultant in Moscow.

You may not understand this, but let me translate. There’s one bullet there that says…

представительная внешность, возраст от 18 до 30 лет

This translates to “good looks, age between 18 and 30”.

I’m not sure about the legality or ethics of that first “good looks” part, but the explicit age qualifier is illegal in many countries. It appears to be fine in Russian Federation. To me personally, this is telling about both the business and hiring culture in Russian Federation and the flexibility of big companies to bend after it for business purposes. In practice, legal and ethical standards are relative, not absolute, and depend on the local (business) culture.

In Estonia, age qualifiers in hiring ads like this were commons about ten years ago. They were ruled to be both immoral and illegal and have disappeared since.

UPDATE: ten hours after posting this, the Russian ad is gone. Don’t know if it’s connected to this post or not. I just want to underline that I don’t think Apple is in any way a special case, surely you could find other companies doing the same thing, it was just one of the first companies that I could think of.