I agree. These misc. benefits are wonderful and I enjoy them myself, but the heart of the employer-employee relation is not self actualization, it is payment for services rendered.
(Would a manager want to go to a seminar in which they were told they need to pay more money to retain good people? Nah, that's too obvious.)
It make sense to choose employers are comparable money based on these things. It makes sense to earn a little less in exchange for a nicer environment.
But the bottom line is the bottom line. To get and keep top people, you will have to pay market rates.
A friend of mine from Idaho mentioned this. Apparently it is not a generic, vague dislike, but a specific dislike of ex-Californians' willingness to pay very high housing prices; there is a feeling that an influx of such willingness will drive up housing prices.
Re:There have been plenty of Death Marches.
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Actually, IIRC there are more people alive now than the estimated total to have lived and died in recorded history.
Contractors in the US above a certain hourly rate are exempt from a (government-mandated) time and a half got overtime. Of course such a thing could still be negotiated.
You overall comment is totally correct, though.
Re:Irrelevant to most of us
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Many companies bring in contractors because they are not finding enough people, or not finding the right people, to hire as regular employees... not because they want them to specificly write code. There are contractors managing projects, testing, deploying, doing anything that anyone else does.
Re:Irrelevant to most of us
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I agree completely, and I take my clients success very seriously, regardless of whether I am there as employee, contractor, consultant, whatever.
It is frustrating to see advice not followed, but that does not remove the obligation do your best.
Re:Irrelevant to most of us
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[[Contractors are there to deliver a specific product by a specific date]]
Around here (the midwest), nearly all contractors are used in "staff augmentation" mode, not "here is a project, go do it" mode. In other words, there is no contracted specific product by a specific date, there is only "show up, work on X, get paid $Y", with a vague idea that the project X is suppossed to take N months. Contractors of this type are certainly not in breach of anything because a project is late.
I'm waving my hand in front of my screen, no flash at all.
(Of course, I use a notebook PC with active matrix LCD... I find the stable, physically unmovable nonjittering pixels much easier on the eyes than a CRT.)
I would do it the middle tier (business logic layer), hopefully affecting neither the front end presentation layer nor the database, and making it possible to apply that same piece of logic to different data backends.
For complex queries, Access's query engine / optimizer is actually VERY good. For complex queries, MySQL does a poor job; it can't do a lot of types of query feature, and does not optimize well.
Of course, I have built web services on MySQL, not on Access.
Sometimes, when an employee leaves on good terms, there is a full intention that they will dial in or whatever from time to time to help transition responsbilities to other people... so ongoing access is not necessarily always an oversight or mistake.
To me, all of this is a harsh overreaction. Rather than refuse so sternly to be contacted, do one of two things:
1) Get a job somewhere which won't bother you out of work hours anyway. There are many, many such companies.
2) Get a job / business such that you will be compensated appropriately when interrupted off-hours. For example, some consultants have a minimum 2-hour billing for "evening/weekend" emergencies. If a client calls with a problem so urgent they want to pay you 2 hours just to talk for a little while, then heh, it's probably a really important problem, go solve it.
How do you become aware of violations, though? Obviously noone would want to use a service which sifted through their files, looking for copyright violations.
I find that the "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" effect is particularly rampant in Java... everything looks like an object, even things that could be better expressed as something other than an object.
1) There are a TON of third party data access components for Delphi, and I expect they will follow shortly for Linux. They are discussed and listed on my web site:
http://kylecordes.com
2) The idea that data aware controls are only for disposable apps is something that comes from the VB world, there that is true. However, Delphi data aware controls work extremely well and have various events, states, etc. that you might need to get the desired behavious. If you don't use data aware controls, you essentially write your own data awareness layer - why bother? The Borland layer works well, and you have the source to it (The VCL) if you are concerned about how it works.
3) Delphi is a fantastic development tool, as many others here have pointed out.
Sometimes it appears that only WebSphere, WebLogic, and IPlanet are on the corporate radar. Some people are surprised to learn that there are over a dozen Java app servers out there.
Do people generally end up making arrangement using the mechanisms provided? Or just using it as a source of leads and contacting the other party directly to work out the deal?
In my experience so far, IBM's WebSphere is (needlessly) painful to install/configure. It is also current stuck in the dark ages of Java 1.1.x, while 1.2.x has been out for a long time and 1.3.0 is also out.
I am told that WS works well once in production, but we haven't gotten that far yet...
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, some jobs higher up the scale get you *farther* from actual deliverables, in to a more consultative and advisory role.
I agree. These misc. benefits are wonderful and I enjoy them myself, but the heart of the employer-employee relation is not self actualization, it is payment for services rendered.
(Would a manager want to go to a seminar in which they were told they need to pay more money to retain good people? Nah, that's too obvious.)
It make sense to choose employers are comparable money based on these things. It makes sense to earn a little less in exchange for a nicer environment.
But the bottom line is the bottom line. To get and keep top people, you will have to pay market rates.
A friend of mine from Idaho mentioned this. Apparently it is not a generic, vague dislike, but a specific dislike of ex-Californians' willingness to pay very high housing prices; there is a feeling that an influx of such willingness will drive up housing prices.
Actually, IIRC there are more people alive now than the estimated total to have lived and died in recorded history.
Contractors in the US above a certain hourly rate are exempt from a (government-mandated) time and a half got overtime. Of course such a thing could still be negotiated.
You overall comment is totally correct, though.
Many companies bring in contractors because they are not finding enough people, or not finding the right people, to hire as regular employees... not because they want them to specificly write code. There are contractors managing projects, testing, deploying, doing anything that anyone else does.
I agree completely, and I take my clients success very seriously, regardless of whether I am there as employee, contractor, consultant, whatever.
It is frustrating to see advice not followed, but that does not remove the obligation do your best.
[[Contractors are there to deliver a specific product by a specific date]]
Around here (the midwest), nearly all contractors are used in "staff augmentation" mode, not "here is a project, go do it" mode. In other words, there is no contracted specific product by a specific date, there is only "show up, work on X, get paid $Y", with a vague idea that the project X is suppossed to take N months. Contractors of this type are certainly not in breach of anything because a project is late.
I'm waving my hand in front of my screen, no flash at all.
(Of course, I use a notebook PC with active matrix LCD... I find the stable, physically unmovable nonjittering pixels much easier on the eyes than a CRT.)
I would do it the middle tier (business logic layer), hopefully affecting neither the front end presentation layer nor the database, and making it possible to apply that same piece of logic to different data backends.
For complex queries, Access's query engine / optimizer is actually VERY good. For complex queries, MySQL does a poor job; it can't do a lot of types of query feature, and does not optimize well.
Of course, I have built web services on MySQL, not on Access.
Apparently, support for a new, async-capable socket API will be included in an upcoming JDK release.
j sr/jsr_051_ioapis.html
http://java.sun.com/aboutJava/communityprocess/
Sometimes, when an employee leaves on good terms, there is a full intention that they will dial in or whatever from time to time to help transition responsbilities to other people... so ongoing access is not necessarily always an oversight or mistake.
If such a rocket could be built, it would seem to me that using it to either
1) move stuff up to space
or
2) move stuff around the planet, via a nice high (ballastic) trajectory
would be a much more worthwhile use of it.
To me, all of this is a harsh overreaction. Rather than refuse so sternly to be contacted, do one of two things:
1) Get a job somewhere which won't bother you out of work hours anyway. There are many, many such companies.
2) Get a job / business such that you will be compensated appropriately when interrupted off-hours. For example, some consultants have a minimum 2-hour billing for "evening/weekend" emergencies. If a client calls with a problem so urgent they want to pay you 2 hours just to talk for a little while, then heh, it's probably a really important problem, go solve it.
How do you become aware of violations, though? Obviously noone would want to use a service which sifted through their files, looking for copyright violations.
This would also greatly reduce the usefulness of the system.
We are seeing related issues at diskwise.com
(I might post more info in another message)
You would also lose 90% or more of your users.
Would *you* offer up credit card info for a "free" services? Not me.
Yes, but Jar-Jar would have been much less annoying on a 19" TV, for example.
Especially if it was turned off.
I find that the "if all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail" effect is particularly rampant in Java... everything looks like an object, even things that could be better expressed as something other than an object.
A few points:
1) There are a TON of third party data access components for Delphi, and I expect they will follow shortly for Linux. They are discussed and listed on my web site:
http://kylecordes.com
2) The idea that data aware controls are only for disposable apps is something that comes from the VB world, there that is true. However, Delphi data aware controls work extremely well and have various events, states, etc. that you might need to get the desired behavious. If you don't use data aware controls, you essentially write your own data awareness layer - why bother? The Borland layer works well, and you have the source to it (The VCL) if you are concerned about how it works.
3) Delphi is a fantastic development tool, as many others here have pointed out.
Sometimes it appears that only WebSphere, WebLogic, and IPlanet are on the corporate radar. Some people are surprised to learn that there are over a dozen Java app servers out there.
I know nothing about BV, which may be an excellent product. However, I recently happened across a page of someone who thinks otherwise:
http://www.peterme.com/bvsucks/
Do people generally end up making arrangement using the mechanisms provided? Or just using it as a source of leads and contacting the other party directly to work out the deal?
In my experience so far, IBM's WebSphere is (needlessly) painful to install/configure. It is also current stuck in the dark ages of Java 1.1.x, while 1.2.x has been out for a long time and 1.3.0 is also out.
I am told that WS works well once in production, but we haven't gotten that far yet...