I did as a lumberjack. This required about 10,000+ dietary calories per day though... Chopping down trees, moving wood, and burning doesn't require anywhere near the same order of mental strength as programming. At first I could only do the work for 2-3 hours a day, but my body became stronger and by the end of the summer I was able to do 15 hour days, and I liked working long and hard. My dad received a grant from the forest service to put in fire breaks the summer before I went to college. This was an effort to encourage private landowners to create firebreaks so that the Gila National forest could be left to burn during a fire, without as much pressure on the Forest Service to stop it because private property was threatened. His land borders the Gila on three sides.
For programming (and other mental jobs), I 100% agree with you based on my experience. I try and do about 20 hours a week of actual coding, 10-20 hours of business development and sales, and then about 10-20 hours per week of construction. That helps me keep my balance. Thankfully, I am self employed as a software developer and have rental property. The most I was ever actually able to code at a "job" was about 30 hours a week - the other 10-15 were usually spent in meetings, design, talking with customers and helping other people work through their problems (also meetings, but super informal.)
I think people are different. With the right amount of physical training, my body could handle 12 hour days at lumberjacking at 19 years old. Maybe I could do that again at 30, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone else would be very happy programming at their job for 60 hours a week. One of my buddies programs 40 for his job, and then does at least another 20 on his personal projects. He might take a 60 hour per week deal if his work offered him 1.5-2.0x his current salary, and be totally happy. I'm not sure, people are different.
I mean, this author is generalizing from his experiences at a graphic design company to the entire American workforce. Does anyone else see a problem with this? Historically, everyone used to work a ton on a farm or in manufacturing. Maybe it makes sense for people to work a ton on a farm, or in (industrializing, pre-robot) manufacturing. Maybe it doesn't make sense for people to work a ton at paper-leaf.com.
I don't think it's possible to generalize accurately. I'm totally happy, and productive, working 60 hour weeks split between programming and construction projects.
Many of these comments place H1B's as a target of their wrath. I have never experienced this to be the case, but I also don't like to go around blaming immigrants for problems I created for myself. I have seen (and benefited from!) a job posting being specifically opened for me, exactly, to fulfill some corporate requirements.
I think the people that bash H1B's and internal posts are on to something. These super specific requirements are to reject someone (Americans & external applications described above.) I disagree that this tends to be on the basis of citizenship, but I'm sure that does happen. What I saw was super specific requirements used for was a way to reject someone you didn't really want to work with, because they were basically unpleasant, but probably technically competent. I imagine that this actually classification fits into a large portion of the slashdot community, with the negativity I read in the majority of comments on pretty much every post. At the places I worked as an employee, it was a lot "easier" (in terms of not getting sued, and rejecting someone) to possibly allow them to interview if they seemed technical competent, and then reject them based on an unrealistic, wish-list of skills, as opposed to rejecting them because they kept complaining, or for some other (politically incorrect/illegal/lawsuit-prone) reason.
It is very, very, VERY difficult to fire someone in the United States. Even in "right to work" states, employers have a lot of fear about lawsuits and other employment related issues. I took the independent contractor route, and it is BY FAR easier for me to score clients than it any of the multi-phase, tons of telephone, and in-person, interviews required to be an employee. Wouldn't you want to be extra careful on the hiring side, if the firing side is going to be difficult? As a contractor, if someone doesn't like me, I'm gone in an instant! Between this, and being able to ramp-up / ramp-down my time, it's a way more flexible agreement than permanent employment, and I find marketing myself as a contractor to be much more pleasant than the four or five times I marketed myself as a technical employee.
I hope you find this useful, entertaining, and not too offensive.
Who will pay for this? Since the article did not mention, I assume that will be the owners of these companies. Unless California starts paying me for development, it's going to be kind of slow to add the ($_POSTED['state'] == 'CA' && $_POSTED['age] 18) { bunch of code...} to the sites I work on....
Exactly! Why would this person go to so much trouble to even find a "next course of action?" Having your own mail domain is pretty cool for this kind of thing, but why spend ANY time trying to ensure the integrity of a mail list for some other company? I think a generic letter to send out when this happens is probably the extent any good Samaritan should reasonably go to.
I would recommend the "next course of action" being to delete the email address that is part of a compromised list, make a new one for communicating with the company, and then don't worry about it anymore.
I agree 100%. My suggestion for waiting is due to the fact that you don't actually know how much money the insurance company will give you, until they actually give you the money. Why spend money you don't have, or mentally prepare to spend such money, on consumption of consumer electronics? Honestly, I think most people spend money they don't have, but it would be a better idea to know what your budget is before you spend it, or made decisions regarding spending it.
If I had to replace all the technology in my house, I would immediately replace my laptop (as an independent software contractor it is my livelihood) and my cell phone. There is nothing else I would start mentally replacing before I had the cash in my hand, and even after that point, I'm not sure if I would replace anything, since my electronics sound like they suck compared to yours, and my insurance company MIGHT give me $15 for my crappy speakers.
There might be something you enjoy spending 10k on more than TVs and electronics too. That's why I like the post I replied to. The above approach might help you find out if there is something you like more.
I always find it interesting when our IT person describes to me in great detail all the not-save-for-work pages people have been viewing at work. You could make this really, really interesting (hot seat style) by building up a lot of tension like you are about to 'out' someone for inappropriate Internet use, in front of everyone. If you wanted it to be all in good fun, you could use real inappropriate pages that people are looking at, and real data with number of times they have accessed those pages, but not actually name any names.
I'm not sure if being a South Korean company necessarily means they build most of their stuff in South Korea. South Korea is a developed country, and has much higher labor costs as compared to China. Maybe they do, but I wouldn't think so (no actual evidence here to back up my suspicion.)
Apple is an American company, but I don't think they build most of their products in the United States.
Are you kidding? 40k USD per year for that job in *AFRICAN COUNTRY RUN BY A DICTATOR* is amazing! He has three cars, two drivers, six maids, two chefs, a butler, a 15,000 square foot mansion, a private army AND parties out with *DICTATOR* on the weekends. Don't you remember the scene from Eurotrip in Eastern Europe?
Movie Name: EuroTrip (2004) Quote:
Waiter: [Scottie tosses the waiter a nickel] Ah! A nickel! [waiter
shows his manager] You see this? [slaps the manager] I quit. I open
my own hotel.
When I went to Costa Rica, I bought three bananas for 1.25 cents (1 + 1/4 cents, not dollars). Costa Rica is rich for Central America, and is an agricultural power house, but that's still REALLY cheap. It all depends on the location, and possibly in this case, the exaggeration.
-Brian J. Stinar-
*This post has been edited for content to avoid offending any specific Africans living in countries run by dictators, general offense is fine for humor purposes.*
Send me a message if you would like to talk about this. I have a few ideas which may be of use, but I have no idea if they are feasible, practical or desirable. Most of the ways that were discussed here with burying things can be automated with custom software (auto form submitters, anyone?) As well as a number of the other suggestions given. I have a small software consulting company, and I am very interested in talking with you (free initial quote) about how custom software may be used to help solve your problem.
I'm the Brian Stinar with blog posts on software development, not the Brian Stinar with a web page on being an opera singer. You can leave me a comment on my blog, a message on facebook, or check out any of the other forums I'm on.
I highly recommend "Ideum." (http://www.ideum.com/) They are based near Albuquerque, New Mexico and specialize in EXACTLY that sort of thing. I interviewed with this company during a job search I went through a few months ago, but after receiving an offer I decided to work with another small company that provided a better offer instead. Ideum has some cool table top, and desk top museum exhibits in place for major museums already. The founder, Jim Spadaccini, is an extremely friendly and nice guy.
They have a general software framework in place built using ActionScript and C++ to make building custom, interactive, touch-screen programs very fast. Their process was quite impressive, and seemed well designed to segregate the work between the hard core coder and the hard core artist in order to quickly make an impressive exhibit. One of the coolest products they were developing was called "GestureWorks." It is designed to make programming multi-touch displays very easy in ActionScript. As a programmer, I can add an eventListener to an object for "throw away" or for "click and hold."
If you give them a call, tell Jim that Brian Stinar referred you! If he gets busy enough, maybe I'll get a consulting or contracting gig on the side out of it.
I hope this help,
-Brian J. Stinar-
Re:Do people really use these, on a regular basis?
on
The Gym Arcade
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Hey,
I ride my road bike around a lot. Due to that fact that I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the weather almost always allows bicycling as a means of transportation, I have been able to keep my goal of going through one tank of gas per month on my SUV. I'm also fairly into mountain biking, with the beautiful foot hills available for single track and Sandia mountain available for downhill riding.
So, I'm pretty into biking. The goal of the above was to add SOME level of credibility to the below...
I tried Expresso at the University of New Mexico gym and it was not that cool. I'm not certain what model I was on, or what levels were loaded but it definitely did not have triggers on the handlebars for shooting anything. It has about 15 boring levels involving riding around a race track. I thought the most interesting was "campus loop." At first, I was excited under the hope that collisions would recoil and there would be rumble strips build into various locations around the bike. Unfortunately, whenever I ran into something I just ghosted through it.
The gearing mechanism was pretty cool. Most of the time exercise bikes don't respond realistically at all to gearing, but the Expresso model I was on did more so than anything else I've been on. The lact of collisions, off-roading, and angry taunts from the nonexistent collisions were probably my three main criticisms.
Basically, I think I was disappointed by how cool the Expresso I was on COULD have been, but wasn't. Then again, the University did not provide ANY internet connectivity for the Expresso and probably didn't have the latest and greatest model. If I could race against people from around the U.S, interacting in a fun way, I think Expresso would have been cool as I tried it. Stand-alone, it was pretty boring.
I agree with your comment regarding his motivation. If I were in your situation, I would try and keep that motivation by making it fun through showing interest in his progress and giving him a lot of positive feedback. I don't think the details of the language, method or any of the other aspects are as important as making sure it is fun for both of you. You might be able to pick up some books on being an effective teacher, but it sounds like with your skills you will not have an issue as long as you keep the fun part in focus.
When my father taught me about different things (wood working, tile, electrical work) that is the approach he took. My dad is a busy physician, but always enjoyed taking the time to teach me about different projects like that. I'm glad he did.
I went to Alamogordo to watch the competition. As a graduate student in Albuquerque, the 3.5 hour drive was worth it. As the previous poster commented, the Saturday flight was ALMOST successful. The first transition from pad to pad did not have any problems at all. The hovering lander was a very interesting sight to see above the desert. Due to safety issues, the viewing area was too far away to get a good look when the lander was close to the ground. However, a large video screen broadcast the images.
When I was standing there, watching, it was unclear what actually caused them to fail to meet the objectives. I thought the lander actually made the time limit on the return trip but did not land successfully. I thought it tipped over, or something broke off when it came down. However, I was unable to clearly see and my experience was based on a what people were saying over a loud speaker and the images of lander in a dusty cloud on a giant screen. It is interesting to read that they actually did not meet the time limit. I wasn't able to see the Sunday launch.
Overall, I will probably continue to support the competitions. Many people in New Mexico are excited about developing a consumer space industry, myself included. The air show had about the same excitement pattern as a baseball game, very exciting for a small portion of the time and a lot of waiting. I hope that the guys at Armadillo Aerospace know that everyone is rooting for them.
When I get ready to graduate, I will bring a STACK of resumes to the XPrize contests, there were a lot of really cool companies with booths set up.
Slashdot Mirror
I did as a lumberjack. This required about 10,000+ dietary calories per day though... Chopping down trees, moving wood, and burning doesn't require anywhere near the same order of mental strength as programming. At first I could only do the work for 2-3 hours a day, but my body became stronger and by the end of the summer I was able to do 15 hour days, and I liked working long and hard. My dad received a grant from the forest service to put in fire breaks the summer before I went to college. This was an effort to encourage private landowners to create firebreaks so that the Gila National forest could be left to burn during a fire, without as much pressure on the Forest Service to stop it because private property was threatened. His land borders the Gila on three sides.
For programming (and other mental jobs), I 100% agree with you based on my experience. I try and do about 20 hours a week of actual coding, 10-20 hours of business development and sales, and then about 10-20 hours per week of construction. That helps me keep my balance. Thankfully, I am self employed as a software developer and have rental property. The most I was ever actually able to code at a "job" was about 30 hours a week - the other 10-15 were usually spent in meetings, design, talking with customers and helping other people work through their problems (also meetings, but super informal.)
I think people are different. With the right amount of physical training, my body could handle 12 hour days at lumberjacking at 19 years old. Maybe I could do that again at 30, but I'm not sure. Maybe someone else would be very happy programming at their job for 60 hours a week. One of my buddies programs 40 for his job, and then does at least another 20 on his personal projects. He might take a 60 hour per week deal if his work offered him 1.5-2.0x his current salary, and be totally happy. I'm not sure, people are different.
Didn't this use to be standard?
I mean, this author is generalizing from his experiences at a graphic design company to the entire American workforce. Does anyone else see a problem with this? Historically, everyone used to work a ton on a farm or in manufacturing. Maybe it makes sense for people to work a ton on a farm, or in (industrializing, pre-robot) manufacturing. Maybe it doesn't make sense for people to work a ton at paper-leaf.com.
I don't think it's possible to generalize accurately. I'm totally happy, and productive, working 60 hour weeks split between programming and construction projects.
Many of these comments place H1B's as a target of their wrath. I have never experienced this to be the case, but I also don't like to go around blaming immigrants for problems I created for myself. I have seen (and benefited from!) a job posting being specifically opened for me, exactly, to fulfill some corporate requirements.
I think the people that bash H1B's and internal posts are on to something. These super specific requirements are to reject someone (Americans & external applications described above.) I disagree that this tends to be on the basis of citizenship, but I'm sure that does happen. What I saw was super specific requirements used for was a way to reject someone you didn't really want to work with, because they were basically unpleasant, but probably technically competent. I imagine that this actually classification fits into a large portion of the slashdot community, with the negativity I read in the majority of comments on pretty much every post. At the places I worked as an employee, it was a lot "easier" (in terms of not getting sued, and rejecting someone) to possibly allow them to interview if they seemed technical competent, and then reject them based on an unrealistic, wish-list of skills, as opposed to rejecting them because they kept complaining, or for some other (politically incorrect/illegal/lawsuit-prone) reason.
It is very, very, VERY difficult to fire someone in the United States. Even in "right to work" states, employers have a lot of fear about lawsuits and other employment related issues. I took the independent contractor route, and it is BY FAR easier for me to score clients than it any of the multi-phase, tons of telephone, and in-person, interviews required to be an employee. Wouldn't you want to be extra careful on the hiring side, if the firing side is going to be difficult? As a contractor, if someone doesn't like me, I'm gone in an instant! Between this, and being able to ramp-up / ramp-down my time, it's a way more flexible agreement than permanent employment, and I find marketing myself as a contractor to be much more pleasant than the four or five times I marketed myself as a technical employee.
I hope you find this useful, entertaining, and not too offensive.
-Brian J. Stinar-
Who will pay for this? Since the article did not mention, I assume that will be the owners of these companies. Unless California starts paying me for development, it's going to be kind of slow to add the ($_POSTED['state'] == 'CA' && $_POSTED['age] 18) { bunch of code...} to the sites I work on....
Moral of the story is, you can't help stupid people, but you can *force them to vote....
Exactly! Why would this person go to so much trouble to even find a "next course of action?" Having your own mail domain is pretty cool for this kind of thing, but why spend ANY time trying to ensure the integrity of a mail list for some other company? I think a generic letter to send out when this happens is probably the extent any good Samaritan should reasonably go to.
I would recommend the "next course of action" being to delete the email address that is part of a compromised list, make a new one for communicating with the company, and then don't worry about it anymore.
I agree 100%. My suggestion for waiting is due to the fact that you don't actually know how much money the insurance company will give you, until they actually give you the money. Why spend money you don't have, or mentally prepare to spend such money, on consumption of consumer electronics? Honestly, I think most people spend money they don't have, but it would be a better idea to know what your budget is before you spend it, or made decisions regarding spending it.
If I had to replace all the technology in my house, I would immediately replace my laptop (as an independent software contractor it is my livelihood) and my cell phone. There is nothing else I would start mentally replacing before I had the cash in my hand, and even after that point, I'm not sure if I would replace anything, since my electronics sound like they suck compared to yours, and my insurance company MIGHT give me $15 for my crappy speakers.
There might be something you enjoy spending 10k on more than TVs and electronics too. That's why I like the post I replied to. The above approach might help you find out if there is something you like more.
-Brian J. Stinar-
Yes, 'worker' != 'ceo.'
Hello,
I always find it interesting when our IT person describes to me in great detail all the not-save-for-work pages people have been viewing at work. You could make this really, really interesting (hot seat style) by building up a lot of tension like you are about to 'out' someone for inappropriate Internet use, in front of everyone. If you wanted it to be all in good fun, you could use real inappropriate pages that people are looking at, and real data with number of times they have accessed those pages, but not actually name any names.
Anyways, I hope you like this idea.
-Brian J. Stinar-
I like the solar powered idea - then you can throw your grenade and just leave it for a while.
I'm not sure if being a South Korean company necessarily means they build most of their stuff in South Korea. South Korea is a developed country, and has much higher labor costs as compared to China. Maybe they do, but I wouldn't think so (no actual evidence here to back up my suspicion.)
Apple is an American company, but I don't think they build most of their products in the United States.
Wait... We don't have diplomatic relations with Iran, so how is it we are making diplomatic requests? Do they get to make diplomatic requests of us?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93United_States_relations
-Brian J. Stinar-
Are you kidding? 40k USD per year for that job in *AFRICAN COUNTRY RUN BY A DICTATOR* is amazing! He has three cars, two drivers, six maids, two chefs, a butler, a 15,000 square foot mansion, a private army AND parties out with *DICTATOR* on the weekends. Don't you remember the scene from Eurotrip in Eastern Europe?
Movie Name: EuroTrip (2004)
Quote:
Waiter: [Scottie tosses the waiter a nickel] Ah! A nickel! [waiter
shows his manager] You see this? [slaps the manager] I quit. I open
my own hotel.
When I went to Costa Rica, I bought three bananas for 1.25 cents (1 + 1/4 cents, not dollars). Costa Rica is rich for Central America, and is an agricultural power house, but that's still REALLY cheap. It all depends on the location, and possibly in this case, the exaggeration.
-Brian J. Stinar-
*This post has been edited for content to avoid offending any specific Africans living in countries run by dictators, general offense is fine for humor purposes.*
Send me a message if you would like to talk about this. I have a few ideas which may be of use, but I have no idea if they are feasible, practical or desirable. Most of the ways that were discussed here with burying things can be automated with custom software (auto form submitters, anyone?) As well as a number of the other suggestions given. I have a small software consulting company, and I am very interested in talking with you (free initial quote) about how custom software may be used to help solve your problem.
I'm the Brian Stinar with blog posts on software development, not the Brian Stinar with a web page on being an opera singer. You can leave me a comment on my blog, a message on facebook, or check out any of the other forums I'm on.
Thanks and good luck,
-Brian J. Stinar-
Hello,
I highly recommend "Ideum." (http://www.ideum.com/) They are based near Albuquerque, New Mexico and specialize in EXACTLY that sort of thing. I interviewed with this company during a job search I went through a few months ago, but after receiving an offer I decided to work with another small company that provided a better offer instead. Ideum has some cool table top, and desk top museum exhibits in place for major museums already. The founder, Jim Spadaccini, is an extremely friendly and nice guy.
They have a general software framework in place built using ActionScript and C++ to make building custom, interactive, touch-screen programs very fast. Their process was quite impressive, and seemed well designed to segregate the work between the hard core coder and the hard core artist in order to quickly make an impressive exhibit. One of the coolest products they were developing was called "GestureWorks." It is designed to make programming multi-touch displays very easy in ActionScript. As a programmer, I can add an eventListener to an object for "throw away" or for "click and hold."
If you give them a call, tell Jim that Brian Stinar referred you! If he gets busy enough, maybe I'll get a consulting or contracting gig on the side out of it.
I hope this help,
-Brian J. Stinar-
Hey,
I ride my road bike around a lot. Due to that fact that I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico and the weather almost always allows bicycling as a means of transportation, I have been able to keep my goal of going through one tank of gas per month on my SUV. I'm also fairly into mountain biking, with the beautiful foot hills available for single track and Sandia mountain available for downhill riding.
So, I'm pretty into biking. The goal of the above was to add SOME level of credibility to the below...
I tried Expresso at the University of New Mexico gym and it was not that cool. I'm not certain what model I was on, or what levels were loaded but it definitely did not have triggers on the handlebars for shooting anything. It has about 15 boring levels involving riding around a race track. I thought the most interesting was "campus loop." At first, I was excited under the hope that collisions would recoil and there would be rumble strips build into various locations around the bike. Unfortunately, whenever I ran into something I just ghosted through it.
The gearing mechanism was pretty cool. Most of the time exercise bikes don't respond realistically at all to gearing, but the Expresso model I was on did more so than anything else I've been on. The lact of collisions, off-roading, and angry taunts from the nonexistent collisions were probably my three main criticisms.
Basically, I think I was disappointed by how cool the Expresso I was on COULD have been, but wasn't. Then again, the University did not provide ANY internet connectivity for the Expresso and probably didn't have the latest and greatest model. If I could race against people from around the U.S, interacting in a fun way, I think Expresso would have been cool as I tried it. Stand-alone, it was pretty boring.
-Brian J. Stinar-
I agree with your comment regarding his motivation. If I were in your situation, I would try and keep that motivation by making it fun through showing interest in his progress and giving him a lot of positive feedback. I don't think the details of the language, method or any of the other aspects are as important as making sure it is fun for both of you. You might be able to pick up some books on being an effective teacher, but it sounds like with your skills you will not have an issue as long as you keep the fun part in focus.
When my father taught me about different things (wood working, tile, electrical work) that is the approach he took. My dad is a busy physician, but always enjoyed taking the time to teach me about different projects like that. I'm glad he did.
-Brian J. Stinar-
Hey,
I went to Alamogordo to watch the competition. As a graduate student in Albuquerque, the 3.5 hour drive was worth it. As the previous poster commented, the Saturday flight was ALMOST successful. The first transition from pad to pad did not have any problems at all. The hovering lander was a very interesting sight to see above the desert. Due to safety issues, the viewing area was too far away to get a good look when the lander was close to the ground. However, a large video screen broadcast the images.
When I was standing there, watching, it was unclear what actually caused them to fail to meet the objectives. I thought the lander actually made the time limit on the return trip but did not land successfully. I thought it tipped over, or something broke off when it came down. However, I was unable to clearly see and my experience was based on a what people were saying over a loud speaker and the images of lander in a dusty cloud on a giant screen. It is interesting to read that they actually did not meet the time limit. I wasn't able to see the Sunday launch.
Overall, I will probably continue to support the competitions. Many people in New Mexico are excited about developing a consumer space industry, myself included. The air show had about the same excitement pattern as a baseball game, very exciting for a small portion of the time and a lot of waiting. I hope that the guys at Armadillo Aerospace know that everyone is rooting for them.
When I get ready to graduate, I will bring a STACK of resumes to the XPrize contests, there were a lot of really cool companies with booths set up.
-Brian-
I do have to say that "Thug Life 101" would not have been a major at my high school. I am grateful for that.
-Brian-