that is what I was referring to. but that expectation of privacy means more than you've said. it means that you can do illegal things but because you were in private no one was allowed to see you, even if they did. it's actually a part of the american fourth amended, and amounts to a right to search too, not that I'm american either.
So, for example, it's slanderous to publicly call someone ignorant, but not to do so privately. Similarly, you are totally allowed to hate someone privately. You can even threaten to kill someone to your friend. But not publicly. Lible is all about publicity.
But more important, and way more fundamental, most laws are centred around making others feel comfortable. So the moment enough people don't like what you're doing, it becomes illegal in one manner or another. It starts off as mischievious, and goes all the way to terrorist, all depending purely on how many people don't like what you're doing.
So really, in this case, I couldn't care less what one person said about a sports player. But he had absolutely no reason to shout it from the rooftops, so to speak. And that's the point. The modern ability for anyone to communicate that loudly doesn't given them the ability to say everything that loudly.
Making the comments is fine. Publishing the comments to a few million people is the criminal offense. What reason could this guy possibly have had for talking to millions of people? That's right, none.
So much like anyone who talks to millions of people, this guy instantly became a public figure -- because millions of people listened -- and so immediately loses a whole whack of rights -- including his own privacy and the right to say what he pleases in his own home.
So it makes perfect sense, and is perfectly justified. You get to say whatever you like about whomever you'd like...to your friends in the privacy of your own home, and to a random stranger sitting next to you at the ball game. That right does not extend to the blimp over the field.
There were never any laws stopping someone from watching the outside of your house. There never needed to be. Long ago, the only ones who could were your neighbours, and long-distance enemies camping out. Either way there were very easy deterents. But when remotely operating camperas and such appeared, the law said supported my right to see the outside of your house. So I was allowed to aim a camera at your house. That camera later became infrared and could see through walls. But you posted a photograph of your living room online, so you had no expectation of privacy for your living room, even to my camera. It spiralled like that a few times to wind up here.
The problem is that there was no old law not because people should have the right to view other people's houses. There was no old law because there didn't need to be -- it wasn't an actual problem. When it became a problem, well, our laws are based on precedent. In this case, a lack thereof.
The real law should have been aimed at objectives, like supporting privacy not as an abstract concept but as a control over something. That something can become public but the control over that something should never have been.
We see this in commercial IP all the time. "reserve all rights", duplication rights, publication rights, and more. But those never existing to the outside of your house. So I could publish the outside of your house any way I choose. The result is this.
...or, and here's a novel idea, you could pick a technique appropriate to the kind of driving you're doing.
10-2 is nice for long highway driving, since it takes a lot of the weight of my arms off of my shoulders.
9-3 is great on the track, since it gives me a greater range of motion, and gives me more feedback through the wheel. it also places my hands in the perfect position for the paddle shifters.
8-4 I've actually found quite nice in the rain or snow, when traction is reduced, since it lets me drift and fish-tail with greater control when tires slip.
And for comfortable city driving, 10-5 is definitely the way to go. Of course, at those speeds, it really doesn't matter. So leaving my right arm free to shift from the floor, and raising my left arm's elbow to reach the window sill is more important as it reduces stress and focus -- two things which increase road rage and decrease comfort.
The article misses one of the more important tips -- thumb placement, or how to actually grip the steering wheel.
Of my four internal drives, only one has non-recoverable data on it (business and personal). The others are things like games and applications which can always be reinstalled. So a second drive is the same size as the first, and a nightly backup combination of windows backup and a few scripts copies that data from the first to the second drive. I like having recent backups fully accessible.
On the long-term side, every few weeks, or months, I copy from the second drive to a drive in the closet -- which really should be off-site, but I don't really worry about those types of things in my life.
So between the two, I can really only lose a single day of work. For anything particularly impressive, I just drag the file to the second drive when I'm done that work, to make me feel better.
But that's it. At this point, the closet has about ten drives covering the last ten years. The second drive has a good two years on it, fully compressed of course. And it takes me about two years to fill a backup drive. Of course, my business files are mostly text. If I were playing with more images than I do, I'd go through drives about ten times as quickly, which would mean one backup drive per quarter. Which is still only $300 per year these days, so that's fine.
if it really is those "who regularly consult" then I think it's a good move. You need to slow the growth of anyone who would otherwise join such endeavours, and security at airports and cameras everywhere ain't better. it's not that this is a good thing, it's that it's an excellent replacement for worse things. and because it's earlier in the process, it's way better.
local wouldn't be cheaper, since it would be priced competitively. So until local is sufficient to suplant remote, remote will set the price. That said, when local does reach appropriate capacity, that's when things should change.
it likely won't happen that way. but in my opinion it definitely couldn't even have happened any earlier than that.
They lost a third right after the switch huh? And they switched randomly, at a random time, for no reason whatsoever. And, most importantly, they lost a third compared to the control nokia group that lost nothing right? Uhuh.
Oh, and certain death, right. compared, again, to not doing it and being gloriously successful? No. Compared to going some other random way and maybe being kind of sustainable. I respect people who decide to try for better and risk having nothing over those who decide to stay middle-of-the-pack.
So what would you prefer? Yet another android phone, this time with samsung scratched off and nokia silk-screened in its place? Or would you prefer something totally different that has a chance of failing?
Tell you what. Go and buy the someone's android device, scratch off the logo yourself, and use a silver sharpie to write nokia in its place. then you'll have what you want.
Having started a company to invent and engineer something, I took it upon myself to figure that maybe there might be safety laws for me to follow. With a lot of research, I discovered that in Canada, my device needed to meet radiation and electrical and electrical safety standards.
I read the public laws only to find that the law said "it must meet the specifications found in CSA document 165a" or some equivalently worded reference. And, of course, that CSA document wasn't free. I said hell no, I'm not paying anything to see my laws. They told me to go to a library. Turns out the libraries only have the old obsolete versions. I said hell no again.
In the end, we bot hgot what we wanted. CSA let me into their local offices, and to their "library" where they had the document waiting for me, with a paper and pen to take notes. Sixty pages of document and three pages of notes later, I was done and happy.
So anyone stuck in this scenario, that's the easy way through that I found.
Working from home doesn't mean pretending to not be home. If you try to work 9 - 5 from home, you're either going to fail, or are missing the point.
By sacrificing what, for the sake of conversation, we'll call the motivation of having others around, you get to chunk your time. Time chunking is an awesome thing once you get used to it. And it's a scary thing until you do.
For example, today, I went out mid-afternoon to buy running shoes, toothpaste, and to enjoy the wonderful weather. Right in the middle of the work day.
The trick is this: chunk your time. Take whatever work you have to do, and chunk it up into manageable chunks. What's manageable? The smaller the better. The first thing that you'll discover is that you'll have varying sized chunks. Some as long as 10 hours, and others as short as 1 minute.
Decide how many chunk you want to do, or how long you want to spend working, or just start. But you get the feeling that you've accomplished something, start again -- either get up and leave, or start another chunk. Some chunks aren't whole invoices, or even entire tasks. Some are just minimal things like readying a new environment, testing something, calling someone, or designing something. Others are full blown work efforts.
The goal of chunks is really to make the task so small and atomic that nothing can stop you from doing it and getting it done. So there's no fear in starting. In truth, some bits of work hit walls of horror, and when they appear, you don't get up until you reach the end of your chunk. Otherwise, start subdividing your chunks.
Every time you get up, something has been completed -- even if it's just that you defined new chunks. And every time you sit down to work, you know where you'll be starting.
After that, it doesn't matter when you do the chunks. I love that one hour chunk saturday afternoon when I'm ready to go out on a date, but am still an hour early. Or that Tuesday midnight 3-hour chunk that seems to be free time out of no where.
Programming is little more than staring at the computer and telling it that it's not good enough. If you can tell the machine, you can tell yourself. Just don't stop. It's all really easy, just keep going.
I know that in my country, that's called counterfeiting, and it's incredibly illegal. You might not want to do that. Not at any size, not at any quality, and not even in black and white. Quite frankly, if you can do it at all, that's probably covered under owning counterfeiting equipment and that alone is probably illegal enough.
You're talking about federal currency here. That's not a joke.
I leave my car parked, top-down. Someone walks by, installs a patch that disables my brakes. So who's at fault? Me for not protecting my car, mazda for not key-protecting the upgrade system, the mazda software team for not password-protecting the upgrade system, or the someone who walked by and just plugged something in? Didn't steal anything, didn't take anything, didn't directly damage anything, just plugged a usb into a slot -- maybe not even his own usb. maybe it was my usb with an experimental patch that I wasn't ready to install.
I'm perfectly happy with my dealer/mechanic running patch upgrades when I already bring my car in twice a year for wheels and oil and winter and such. and in those environments, an upgrade can be followed by what upgrades in software industries are followed by -- tests. you don't upgrade your computer and then just assume that it works again for anything serious.
that's not being cheap, that's recognizing costs -- money I could be giving to employees, you piece of shit.
no, it doesn't. not unless it's syntax highlighted to look like my platform. you can't post to slashdot from ultraedit, nor mysql query browser, nor paintshop.
I'm not in any danger due to one employee, because I don't take that risk. did you not follow along? I'm not having any problems. This is why.
And very very wrong, is exactly what you're proposing.
like I said. I've been there, I've done that. I know what's worked and what hasn't. I couldn't care less what you do. You're welcome to make the same mistakes. enjoy.
not true. been there, done that. how would you go about getting your corporate equipment back from a telecommuter? who won't answer your calls and isn't obligated to do so? you get to try for a few weeks, then send a registered letter, which gets returned a few weeks after that, then you get to sue that employee for a $2'000 laptop? and what about the confidential records that they have at home?
even if you give an non-telecommuter those things, you can deal with it before they leave the building, in a hundred and one different ways.
odd that you could say that. seeing as how I've been describing the problems that I've solved. you're the only one in this conversation with problems. I've got none. my business runs smoothly, my employees work as expected, my clients are satisfied, and I'm making money nicely.
you might want to learn the difference between someone with a problem, and someone without one.
I never said the manager would estimate the job. you still didn't read. I said the manager would manage the client's expectations.
they aren't estimatable becase loads of other carp gets thrown in. that's the industry, and that's the job. and that's what makes it all profitable. you can't estimate something that's going to change based on outside input. that's what's getting managed. it's not the employees, it's the carp.
It's the bug in mysql that you found on an otherwise normal select query, that now takes seven hours to work around, since it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place. but it's a bug in the query optimizer, and there isn't anything you can do about it now.
for all of those reasons, you can't wait until one project's done before getting a new one. because you don't know when the current project will be done. and you can't survive with nothing to do between projects while you search for new ones. your programmers will simply have nothing to do until your sales department's done, and then your sales department will have nothing to do until your developers are done.
it's not about screwing over clients. it's about your clients sharing the carp that this industry deals with. they can't get software without the problems that software industries have.
so you were a contractor, and became an employee so as to not lose your job. you can always quit and become a contractor again. I adore my contractors. I don't need to pay them -- ever if I don't like the work. I can treat them well, and they'll always serve my interests. I can treat them poorly, and still pay them, and they'll still always serve my interests. that's the fun thing about business to business, especially between small businesses. of course, they rarely stick to timelines of any kind. but that's par for the course.
it doesn't matter why you stopped being a contractor. you did, and you haven't gone back. we're done here. you have someone else getting you the work, someone else convincing the client to pay for it, someone else invoicing, someone else collecting, someone else doing your taxes. your work is lined up for you, you take zero risk when it comes to working and not getting paid, and all you need to do is your job on a day by day basis.
For you to spend a dollar, you need to earn a dollar-fifty, get paid a dollar-twenty, then pay twenty cents of taxes. For me to spend a dollar, I need to find someone able to pay five dollars, convince them that something is worth five dollars, get them to promise to paying the five dollars, organize the work, get the client deliverables, divide the work, supervise the work, do some of the work myself, give updates along the way, deliver the work, present the work, organize changes to the work, deliver the work again, present the work again, invoice for the work, wait, remind them to pay the invoice, wait, demand they pay the invoice, wait, go and pickup the cheque myself, then hope that of the five dollars, after paying employees, employee taxes, office expenses, and insurances, that there remains a dollar-fifty to pay myself.
see the difference? of course you want work lined up one day at a time, you get paid for each day. I need to take a six month process, and at the end of those six months, have some money to pay everyone at all times. it necessarily needs to overlap with another six month cycle by as much as five months, since most of my six months was spent waiting for the client.
you're not listening -- or reading. stop quoting individual sentences within paragraphs of context.
programmers can't self-manage themselves because they can't estimate how long a task will take because programming tasks aren't estimatable so I need to manage clients and their expectations without having any idea how long an employee is going to actually take to do something and since clients can cancel for being one day late and not start for not giving an estimate I need to promise a date and manage the client knowing full well that no one knows how long it'll take.
is it better without punctuation? quote that sentence.
obviously you're going to get more work added and more distractions. welcome to business. you think a client assigns one project, and waits for it to be completed before assigning another project? not the good clients. the good ones continue to buy services independently of what's done. and the priorities flip in reality for them as well as for us.
and then there's the actual business side. would you want me, your boss, to throw away a new client because we're fully booked with existing client work? or would you rather I take on the new client, and screw over the time-line of the existing client? Here's a hint. the former gives us two clients, one slightly upset or understanding and the other with a full budget. the latter gives us one client with no remaining projects. so the former guarantees the employees work for another two to five cycles, while the latter gives the employees work only through to the end of the current cycle, then nothing.
so which do you want? I'll bet it's different if you're a contractor vs an employee. and that's why telecommuting employees need to be treated like contractors, but unfortunately as employees aren't.
but hey, be a contractor. that solves all of my problems. pay your own damn taxes, work when I have work for you and charge me nothing when I don't. deal with your own benefits, your own supplies, and your own time. then you can be a telecommuter all you like. I don't need to pay you until 30 days after you're done the work. that's perfect for me.
welcome to the non-contractor relationship. it differs in trust, and in supervision, and in guaranteed payment. you get to pick.
congratulations on not knowing what is being managed. it's not the employees. I don't need to know how long a project is going to take in order to control my employees. I need to know in order to control my clients. that's why employees can screw me over. that's why I need to keep tabs on everything. and that's why employee get fired when they become liabilities -- because I don't get paid by the client.
you're incorrect. there is the expectation (the legal expectation) of retraining, support, exceptions, back-pay, forward-pay, severence-pay, getting my equipment back, and more. it's a pain in the ass to fire a telecommuting employee. and that's when they co-operate, which they have no reason to do.
I think you forget that an employee has equipment, data, client files, confidential information and more. firing them requires them to sign things too, if possible. in-person, not letting them walk out of the building until they sign two documents and return my stuff is easy. with telecommuters, it's more likely that I'll simply never see them again. that's terrible for business.
I don't waste my employee's time filling out tickets and commit messages. that's a bigger waste of time than everything else mentioned here. type your code, test your code, and move on. there's no meta-work. that's a good 30% drop in productivity right there. even worse when you need to review them, check them, and the problems that come when someone misunderstands them or they are incorrect. documenting code is the absolute worst thing you can do. learn to read the language, and stop writing cryptic code. then all you need to document is what you didn't code. perl can be read like english. I've built an entire platform to be able to work on live sites and not document anything. it works, it's better, and there's no way in hell that I'll ever go back to repositories and documenting code. get lost.
not at all true. in the office, if I see them not working, I can terminate them on the spot for stealing from me. I've caught them red handed, and it's my right to make any infraction, no matter how small, into an actionable event. if it's sight unseen -- logs be damned -- it's only suspicion. I'm not allowed to grow suspicion into action. I'm supposed to offer retraining, support, and at the very least severence if I choose to let them go. And then they can still yell and scream and argue and sue, however unsuccessfully -- it still costs me time money and effort to terminate them. but in the office scenario, I escort them out immediately, and there's nothing that they can do.
yes I do. you can't just fire someone because you want to without that employee being able to cause a lot more effort to be sunk into firing them. there's the expectation of the opportunity to make it up to the company, retraining, back-pay, forward-pay, severence-pay, benefits, and more. but in the office, if I see an employee not working, I can fire them on the spot, not pay them another dime, and send them packing in ten seconds. they stole from me, I saw them stealing from me, that's it. it's all red-handed all the time. whether or not it was a small infraction, it's my right to make a small infraction significant. but when it's sight unseen, then it's no longer my right to grow suspicion into action. try it some time.
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that is what I was referring to. but that expectation of privacy means more than you've said. it means that you can do illegal things but because you were in private no one was allowed to see you, even if they did. it's actually a part of the american fourth amended, and amounts to a right to search too, not that I'm american either.
So, for example, it's slanderous to publicly call someone ignorant, but not to do so privately. Similarly, you are totally allowed to hate someone privately. You can even threaten to kill someone to your friend. But not publicly. Lible is all about publicity.
But more important, and way more fundamental, most laws are centred around making others feel comfortable. So the moment enough people don't like what you're doing, it becomes illegal in one manner or another. It starts off as mischievious, and goes all the way to terrorist, all depending purely on how many people don't like what you're doing.
So really, in this case, I couldn't care less what one person said about a sports player. But he had absolutely no reason to shout it from the rooftops, so to speak. And that's the point. The modern ability for anyone to communicate that loudly doesn't given them the ability to say everything that loudly.
Making the comments is fine. Publishing the comments to a few million people is the criminal offense. What reason could this guy possibly have had for talking to millions of people? That's right, none.
So much like anyone who talks to millions of people, this guy instantly became a public figure -- because millions of people listened -- and so immediately loses a whole whack of rights -- including his own privacy and the right to say what he pleases in his own home.
So it makes perfect sense, and is perfectly justified. You get to say whatever you like about whomever you'd like...to your friends in the privacy of your own home, and to a random stranger sitting next to you at the ball game. That right does not extend to the blimp over the field.
It's that simple.
There were never any laws stopping someone from watching the outside of your house. There never needed to be. Long ago, the only ones who could were your neighbours, and long-distance enemies camping out. Either way there were very easy deterents. But when remotely operating camperas and such appeared, the law said supported my right to see the outside of your house. So I was allowed to aim a camera at your house. That camera later became infrared and could see through walls. But you posted a photograph of your living room online, so you had no expectation of privacy for your living room, even to my camera. It spiralled like that a few times to wind up here.
The problem is that there was no old law not because people should have the right to view other people's houses. There was no old law because there didn't need to be -- it wasn't an actual problem. When it became a problem, well, our laws are based on precedent. In this case, a lack thereof.
The real law should have been aimed at objectives, like supporting privacy not as an abstract concept but as a control over something. That something can become public but the control over that something should never have been.
We see this in commercial IP all the time. "reserve all rights", duplication rights, publication rights, and more. But those never existing to the outside of your house. So I could publish the outside of your house any way I choose. The result is this.
...or, and here's a novel idea, you could pick a technique appropriate to the kind of driving you're doing.
10-2 is nice for long highway driving, since it takes a lot of the weight of my arms off of my shoulders.
9-3 is great on the track, since it gives me a greater range of motion, and gives me more feedback through the wheel. it also places my hands in the perfect position for the paddle shifters.
8-4 I've actually found quite nice in the rain or snow, when traction is reduced, since it lets me drift and fish-tail with greater control when tires slip.
And for comfortable city driving, 10-5 is definitely the way to go. Of course, at those speeds, it really doesn't matter. So leaving my right arm free to shift from the floor, and raising my left arm's elbow to reach the window sill is more important as it reduces stress and focus -- two things which increase road rage and decrease comfort.
The article misses one of the more important tips -- thumb placement, or how to actually grip the steering wheel.
Of my four internal drives, only one has non-recoverable data on it (business and personal). The others are things like games and applications which can always be reinstalled. So a second drive is the same size as the first, and a nightly backup combination of windows backup and a few scripts copies that data from the first to the second drive. I like having recent backups fully accessible.
On the long-term side, every few weeks, or months, I copy from the second drive to a drive in the closet -- which really should be off-site, but I don't really worry about those types of things in my life.
So between the two, I can really only lose a single day of work. For anything particularly impressive, I just drag the file to the second drive when I'm done that work, to make me feel better.
But that's it. At this point, the closet has about ten drives covering the last ten years. The second drive has a good two years on it, fully compressed of course. And it takes me about two years to fill a backup drive. Of course, my business files are mostly text. If I were playing with more images than I do, I'd go through drives about ten times as quickly, which would mean one backup drive per quarter. Which is still only $300 per year these days, so that's fine.
if it really is those "who regularly consult" then I think it's a good move. You need to slow the growth of anyone who would otherwise join such endeavours, and security at airports and cameras everywhere ain't better. it's not that this is a good thing, it's that it's an excellent replacement for worse things. and because it's earlier in the process, it's way better.
local wouldn't be cheaper, since it would be priced competitively. So until local is sufficient to suplant remote, remote will set the price. That said, when local does reach appropriate capacity, that's when things should change.
it likely won't happen that way. but in my opinion it definitely couldn't even have happened any earlier than that.
Desktop a is on the first monitor, desktop b is on the second monitor. If I want to hide desktop c, I move the third monitor behind the first monitor.
They lost a third right after the switch huh? And they switched randomly, at a random time, for no reason whatsoever. And, most importantly, they lost a third compared to the control nokia group that lost nothing right? Uhuh.
Oh, and certain death, right. compared, again, to not doing it and being gloriously successful? No. Compared to going some other random way and maybe being kind of sustainable. I respect people who decide to try for better and risk having nothing over those who decide to stay middle-of-the-pack.
So what would you prefer? Yet another android phone, this time with samsung scratched off and nokia silk-screened in its place? Or would you prefer something totally different that has a chance of failing?
Tell you what. Go and buy the someone's android device, scratch off the logo yourself, and use a silver sharpie to write nokia in its place. then you'll have what you want.
Having started a company to invent and engineer something, I took it upon myself to figure that maybe there might be safety laws for me to follow. With a lot of research, I discovered that in Canada, my device needed to meet radiation and electrical and electrical safety standards.
I read the public laws only to find that the law said "it must meet the specifications found in CSA document 165a" or some equivalently worded reference. And, of course, that CSA document wasn't free. I said hell no, I'm not paying anything to see my laws. They told me to go to a library. Turns out the libraries only have the old obsolete versions. I said hell no again.
In the end, we bot hgot what we wanted. CSA let me into their local offices, and to their "library" where they had the document waiting for me, with a paper and pen to take notes. Sixty pages of document and three pages of notes later, I was done and happy.
So anyone stuck in this scenario, that's the easy way through that I found.
Working from home doesn't mean pretending to not be home. If you try to work 9 - 5 from home, you're either going to fail, or are missing the point.
By sacrificing what, for the sake of conversation, we'll call the motivation of having others around, you get to chunk your time. Time chunking is an awesome thing once you get used to it. And it's a scary thing until you do.
For example, today, I went out mid-afternoon to buy running shoes, toothpaste, and to enjoy the wonderful weather. Right in the middle of the work day.
The trick is this: chunk your time. Take whatever work you have to do, and chunk it up into manageable chunks. What's manageable? The smaller the better. The first thing that you'll discover is that you'll have varying sized chunks. Some as long as 10 hours, and others as short as 1 minute.
Decide how many chunk you want to do, or how long you want to spend working, or just start. But you get the feeling that you've accomplished something, start again -- either get up and leave, or start another chunk. Some chunks aren't whole invoices, or even entire tasks. Some are just minimal things like readying a new environment, testing something, calling someone, or designing something. Others are full blown work efforts.
The goal of chunks is really to make the task so small and atomic that nothing can stop you from doing it and getting it done. So there's no fear in starting. In truth, some bits of work hit walls of horror, and when they appear, you don't get up until you reach the end of your chunk. Otherwise, start subdividing your chunks.
Every time you get up, something has been completed -- even if it's just that you defined new chunks. And every time you sit down to work, you know where you'll be starting.
After that, it doesn't matter when you do the chunks. I love that one hour chunk saturday afternoon when I'm ready to go out on a date, but am still an hour early. Or that Tuesday midnight 3-hour chunk that seems to be free time out of no where.
Break often.
Programming is little more than staring at the computer and telling it that it's not good enough. If you can tell the machine, you can tell yourself. Just don't stop. It's all really easy, just keep going.
I know that in my country, that's called counterfeiting, and it's incredibly illegal. You might not want to do that. Not at any size, not at any quality, and not even in black and white. Quite frankly, if you can do it at all, that's probably covered under owning counterfeiting equipment and that alone is probably illegal enough.
You're talking about federal currency here. That's not a joke.
I leave my car parked, top-down. Someone walks by, installs a patch that disables my brakes. So who's at fault? Me for not protecting my car, mazda for not key-protecting the upgrade system, the mazda software team for not password-protecting the upgrade system, or the someone who walked by and just plugged something in? Didn't steal anything, didn't take anything, didn't directly damage anything, just plugged a usb into a slot -- maybe not even his own usb. maybe it was my usb with an experimental patch that I wasn't ready to install.
I'm perfectly happy with my dealer/mechanic running patch upgrades when I already bring my car in twice a year for wheels and oil and winter and such. and in those environments, an upgrade can be followed by what upgrades in software industries are followed by -- tests. you don't upgrade your computer and then just assume that it works again for anything serious.
that's not being cheap, that's recognizing costs -- money I could be giving to employees, you piece of shit.
no, it doesn't. not unless it's syntax highlighted to look like my platform. you can't post to slashdot from ultraedit, nor mysql query browser, nor paintshop.
I'm not in any danger due to one employee, because I don't take that risk. did you not follow along? I'm not having any problems. This is why.
And very very wrong, is exactly what you're proposing.
like I said. I've been there, I've done that. I know what's worked and what hasn't. I couldn't care less what you do. You're welcome to make the same mistakes. enjoy.
not true. been there, done that. how would you go about getting your corporate equipment back from a telecommuter? who won't answer your calls and isn't obligated to do so? you get to try for a few weeks, then send a registered letter, which gets returned a few weeks after that, then you get to sue that employee for a $2'000 laptop? and what about the confidential records that they have at home?
even if you give an non-telecommuter those things, you can deal with it before they leave the building, in a hundred and one different ways.
odd that you could say that. seeing as how I've been describing the problems that I've solved. you're the only one in this conversation with problems. I've got none. my business runs smoothly, my employees work as expected, my clients are satisfied, and I'm making money nicely.
you might want to learn the difference between someone with a problem, and someone without one.
I never said the manager would estimate the job. you still didn't read. I said the manager would manage the client's expectations.
they aren't estimatable becase loads of other carp gets thrown in. that's the industry, and that's the job. and that's what makes it all profitable. you can't estimate something that's going to change based on outside input. that's what's getting managed. it's not the employees, it's the carp.
It's the bug in mysql that you found on an otherwise normal select query, that now takes seven hours to work around, since it wasn't supposed to be there in the first place. but it's a bug in the query optimizer, and there isn't anything you can do about it now.
for all of those reasons, you can't wait until one project's done before getting a new one. because you don't know when the current project will be done. and you can't survive with nothing to do between projects while you search for new ones. your programmers will simply have nothing to do until your sales department's done, and then your sales department will have nothing to do until your developers are done.
it's not about screwing over clients. it's about your clients sharing the carp that this industry deals with. they can't get software without the problems that software industries have.
so you were a contractor, and became an employee so as to not lose your job. you can always quit and become a contractor again. I adore my contractors. I don't need to pay them -- ever if I don't like the work. I can treat them well, and they'll always serve my interests. I can treat them poorly, and still pay them, and they'll still always serve my interests. that's the fun thing about business to business, especially between small businesses. of course, they rarely stick to timelines of any kind. but that's par for the course.
it doesn't matter why you stopped being a contractor. you did, and you haven't gone back. we're done here. you have someone else getting you the work, someone else convincing the client to pay for it, someone else invoicing, someone else collecting, someone else doing your taxes. your work is lined up for you, you take zero risk when it comes to working and not getting paid, and all you need to do is your job on a day by day basis.
For you to spend a dollar, you need to earn a dollar-fifty, get paid a dollar-twenty, then pay twenty cents of taxes. For me to spend a dollar, I need to find someone able to pay five dollars, convince them that something is worth five dollars, get them to promise to paying the five dollars, organize the work, get the client deliverables, divide the work, supervise the work, do some of the work myself, give updates along the way, deliver the work, present the work, organize changes to the work, deliver the work again, present the work again, invoice for the work, wait, remind them to pay the invoice, wait, demand they pay the invoice, wait, go and pickup the cheque myself, then hope that of the five dollars, after paying employees, employee taxes, office expenses, and insurances, that there remains a dollar-fifty to pay myself.
see the difference? of course you want work lined up one day at a time, you get paid for each day. I need to take a six month process, and at the end of those six months, have some money to pay everyone at all times. it necessarily needs to overlap with another six month cycle by as much as five months, since most of my six months was spent waiting for the client.
you're not listening -- or reading. stop quoting individual sentences within paragraphs of context.
programmers can't self-manage themselves because they can't estimate how long a task will take because programming tasks aren't estimatable so I need to manage clients and their expectations without having any idea how long an employee is going to actually take to do something and since clients can cancel for being one day late and not start for not giving an estimate I need to promise a date and manage the client knowing full well that no one knows how long it'll take.
is it better without punctuation? quote that sentence.
obviously you're going to get more work added and more distractions. welcome to business. you think a client assigns one project, and waits for it to be completed before assigning another project? not the good clients. the good ones continue to buy services independently of what's done. and the priorities flip in reality for them as well as for us.
and then there's the actual business side. would you want me, your boss, to throw away a new client because we're fully booked with existing client work? or would you rather I take on the new client, and screw over the time-line of the existing client? Here's a hint. the former gives us two clients, one slightly upset or understanding and the other with a full budget. the latter gives us one client with no remaining projects. so the former guarantees the employees work for another two to five cycles, while the latter gives the employees work only through to the end of the current cycle, then nothing.
so which do you want? I'll bet it's different if you're a contractor vs an employee. and that's why telecommuting employees need to be treated like contractors, but unfortunately as employees aren't.
but hey, be a contractor. that solves all of my problems. pay your own damn taxes, work when I have work for you and charge me nothing when I don't. deal with your own benefits, your own supplies, and your own time. then you can be a telecommuter all you like. I don't need to pay you until 30 days after you're done the work. that's perfect for me.
welcome to the non-contractor relationship. it differs in trust, and in supervision, and in guaranteed payment. you get to pick.
congratulations on not knowing what is being managed. it's not the employees. I don't need to know how long a project is going to take in order to control my employees. I need to know in order to control my clients. that's why employees can screw me over. that's why I need to keep tabs on everything. and that's why employee get fired when they become liabilities -- because I don't get paid by the client.
you're incorrect. there is the expectation (the legal expectation) of retraining, support, exceptions, back-pay, forward-pay, severence-pay, getting my equipment back, and more. it's a pain in the ass to fire a telecommuting employee. and that's when they co-operate, which they have no reason to do.
I think you forget that an employee has equipment, data, client files, confidential information and more. firing them requires them to sign things too, if possible. in-person, not letting them walk out of the building until they sign two documents and return my stuff is easy. with telecommuters, it's more likely that I'll simply never see them again. that's terrible for business.
I don't waste my employee's time filling out tickets and commit messages. that's a bigger waste of time than everything else mentioned here. type your code, test your code, and move on. there's no meta-work. that's a good 30% drop in productivity right there. even worse when you need to review them, check them, and the problems that come when someone misunderstands them or they are incorrect. documenting code is the absolute worst thing you can do. learn to read the language, and stop writing cryptic code. then all you need to document is what you didn't code. perl can be read like english. I've built an entire platform to be able to work on live sites and not document anything. it works, it's better, and there's no way in hell that I'll ever go back to repositories and documenting code. get lost.
not at all true. in the office, if I see them not working, I can terminate them on the spot for stealing from me. I've caught them red handed, and it's my right to make any infraction, no matter how small, into an actionable event. if it's sight unseen -- logs be damned -- it's only suspicion. I'm not allowed to grow suspicion into action. I'm supposed to offer retraining, support, and at the very least severence if I choose to let them go. And then they can still yell and scream and argue and sue, however unsuccessfully -- it still costs me time money and effort to terminate them. but in the office scenario, I escort them out immediately, and there's nothing that they can do.
yes I do. you can't just fire someone because you want to without that employee being able to cause a lot more effort to be sunk into firing them. there's the expectation of the opportunity to make it up to the company, retraining, back-pay, forward-pay, severence-pay, benefits, and more. but in the office, if I see an employee not working, I can fire them on the spot, not pay them another dime, and send them packing in ten seconds. they stole from me, I saw them stealing from me, that's it. it's all red-handed all the time. whether or not it was a small infraction, it's my right to make a small infraction significant. but when it's sight unseen, then it's no longer my right to grow suspicion into action. try it some time.