It is probably a BS explanation, or maybe the recruiter was sick of people calling expecting to nail a job in India with an american salary plus relocation. That is just for starters. I bet he did not even bother checking out with the Indian embassy or a local consulate to check on work permit/visa requirements.
In the second half of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series, a new law is enacted, the Trade Reform Act. The law is really simple, it allows the president to pick a country with unfair trade laws and mirror them. They want to inspect every car that arrives at the dock? Sure, we'll do the same. They won't hire americans to work at their code shops? Ok, we'll do the same. This of couse triggers two wars in the series, but the core concept of the law was pretty solid.
I am well aware of the economics of outsourcing to India, my previous employer spent at least 6 months being courted by a half dozen code shops in India. They were complete professionals and very flexible. The skillset was in place, the language skills were better than what we want to believe and the price advantage was good. *That* I can live with.
What it is bothering me is this statement that it is illegal for an american to work in India. I mean, the only thing they had to do was say suuuure, come work for us, but you will get an indian salary commesurate with your skills and experience, we cannot pay you a US salary just because you are an american. That would be fair for everyone involved.
Or somebody in the government should wake up and see all these american going out of work because their jobs are going overseas. This of course sounds horribly naive on my part, but what is going to happen with defense sensitive software development? Are we going to outsource it too?
Some kind of trade reform act would be a great way to wake up India, China and Japan about the real meaning of trade. They can't expect to continue flooding us with cheap products and labor and then taking their profits and spending them elsewhere.
That embarrassing begging display aside, I would really love if somebody would figure out how to add extra functionality to the SMC Barricade wireless routers. At the very least, something to push the logs to a machine elsewhere in the network, as its current archival options are very limited. This is something my old Linksys router was able to do.
Ms Entourage v.X allows you to set links between any of its objects. It also allows you to set more than one category per item, and you can setup custom views to combine these at your leisure. The links are great because on top of the obvious linking to the contacts, you can link to tasks, calendar events, notes. etc.
I took delivery of two Dell 600 CS servers a few months ago and they both had the clickthru license. I thought it was the bios but the first boot for the second box was from a OS install CD and the license did not show up like when I booted the first box.
An orderwire is a 75Khz carrier that can transmit either one-way voice or teletype data. It is the smallest communications signal you send over satellite
Back in my days as a satellite network controller for the Army it was common knowledge all it takes to saturate the whole frequency range for the commo payload is a nice 75Khz spike (enough carrier for a FM orderwire signal). People would argue it could not be done since we pretty much owned the 7.25->8.4 GHZ spectrum, but it worked pretty damn well. This is the equivalent of saturating a T1 with a 14.4 modem.
Especially if you are a programmer. At least a sys admin can get away witih saying no maybe 10% of the time. The second a programmer says no he has attitude and teamwork issues and eventually becomes Fredo's Kiss of Death.
There was a time when it was possible for us programmers to hide behind a project manager whenever the requests were unreasonable or just did not make common sense, but that is no more. When the mass layoffs started the first thing that happened was at least half of these project managers got the axe and many programmers got stuck in PM duties. This is why to many of us this job is turning us into politicians, because it is the only way to survive.
Of course, one could get high and mighty, but the only thing one would get out of this is a pink slip or a bad performance review (like it just happened to me).
The only possible escape is instead of just plain saying no, to deflect the issue with alternative approaches to the problem. What sounds better? "Can't be done.", or "This is not going to work because of... but if we do it this way we can get the same result."
I have CDRs that are 5 years or older and still readable. The ones that have lasted the longer are the ones I kept in a cold, dark place. The ones I left in paper sleeves or Case Logic binders looked like crap within weeks.
I also have retail CDs that are less than 5 years old and have CD rot, so don't think you are safe just because the CD was pressed instead of burned.
Uhm, I run MS Office v.X on OS X 10.2. I have never had a compatibility issue with any user of MS Office 2000 and MS Office XP that has tried to open one of my documents.
The only thing v.X was lacking was in support for Exchange, and we don't use Exchange here so I could care less (plus Microsoft just started adding support to Exchange about a week or two ago).
Hell, I even got Virtual PC 6 but I only use it when I have to manage a SQL Server and terminal services is turned off. Between that and samba I have no constraints from working from a mac.
My previous employer got purchased by a dot-com "umbrella" company a couple years ago. At the same time they bought one of these Mormon companies in Provo (probably 99% of the employees were Mormon).
That company was making a ton of money before our parent company bought them. They knew what the hell they were doing. Where is the company now? Bankrupt. Why? Because of the external interference of the parent company, telling the locals how to run their company. Had our parent company (which btw, also managed to run ours into the ground too) left them alone they would have continued to make bundles of cash.
The only problem I had with the Mormons on my trips to Provo is the whole caffeine thing. Not a goddamn Starbucks anywhere around Provo! I had to either drive to the next town and settle for the Barnes & Noble coffee shop, or drive to Park City, which has at least 5 Starbucks the last time I checked.
This whole Ximian mess looks like something I will be reading over at fuckedcompany.com really soon. Ouch.
If and when they pull off the logistics involved, they will not only nail that gross margin right on the money, but will shock the rest of the industry into following suit. $35,000 is not an obscene amount of money for a car nowadays, and the exotic aspect of so much customization is offset by the fact most of the componentry is mass-produced. If your power steering pump blows up, you can pick one at any auto parts store instead of having to special order it to Japan or Germany.
Car makers already use "just in time" inventories because they only spend for inventory the bare minum they will neeed over the next few hours. Land shipping becomes critical because parts arrive at the assembly lines right as the inventory nears zero.
Once they get name recognition with their boutique car, they can figure out a way to sell a cheap car that just has air conditioning,removable mp3 player and scotchguard sealed seats and then sell it to college students for less than $10,000.
Don't bother lecturing to them about the evils of commercial software, big corps and the like. Try a common sense approach and see how far you can push it.
1. Show them in MS Office how easy it is to type a letter or to do home budget spreadsheet. Then show them how to do it with OpenOffice or KOffice. Then tell them the price of each, including what happens if they have more than one PC in the house.
2. Show them how easy it is to install Windows XP or SuSe (or Drake). Or let's push this one a bit farther: Show them how a pc they thought it was old and obsolete comes back to life as a web surfing station with free software you either downloaded from the web or it came in a CD with a magazine.
3. Show them the iApps in Mac OS X.
4. Demonstrate how there is virtually a website about every possible subject you can come up with. Dare them to the Google challenge!
The important thing is to show them there is always an alternative for what they are trying to do. If they are scared of computers because of past experiences, OS X 10.2, XP and Lindows can help turn them around.
If flexible scheduling is an option, use it for what it's worth. If getting the job done means working in the middle of the night and your output is optimal by doing this, then do it. The best programmer I have ever employed was like that: his muse usually got active around 11 PM and he would usually code until 6 AM or so. Because of this we kept him on flex time and tried not to call him at home before noon. He would do emails and follow-ups in the afternoon and then start programming again around midnight.
When *I* was on flex, I was a bit different. I would wake up around 7 AM, do email until 9 AM or so, then drove to the office for 4 hours, which helped me skip the morning traffic jams. Back at home before 3 PM meant no afternoon traffic jams either. Goof around til early evening and then code from 7:30 PM or so until 1-2 AM.
If flex and telecommuting are not an option, the best thing is to get buy-in from your manager to block out your schedule from non-project intrusions. I now work for a 15-person firm, and I am the only programmer here, plus I have to provide IT support. Whenever I am forced to switch to full-programmer mode the ops manager pretty much builds a wall around me. Anyone that needs me for non-programming tasks needs to go thru her first. This cuts distractions by 75% and I can work 45-hour weeks instead of 60+.
A warning on late-night coding binges: watch out for your health. I don't have a sleeping cycle anymore thanks to 8 years of graveyard shift plus 3 years of flex-time. I have been on a 9-5 schedule for a year and I still have no hope of a regular sleep schedule. Your circadian rhythm will get shot to hell if you are not careful. Also, be careful with the caffeine binges and snacking!
When and where did you do yours? I noticed that the game's qualification range for the M16A2 is missing "Fast Freddie" targets. At least that's what we called the shoulders-up pop-up that is usually placed less than 100 meters from the firing position. The game is set in Ft. Benning but my basic was in Ft. Jackson so I don't know if this is just a location issue or if it was dropped altogether from the design of the firing range.
At least that was the mantra for basic rifle marksmanship when I went thru Army Basic Training almost 11 yrs ago. The way you practice this is by dry-firing the M16A2 (I actually had an A1 issued by accident but the bastards caught me on my first day out in the range, dammit!). You put a dime on top of the deflector and you try to squeeze the trigger without dropping the penny.
I switched from XP Pro to an iBook 600 with Jaguar on September last year, then replaced it with a Ti Book 867 (also Jaguar) this past April. I totally feel your pain with the issue of picking an Intel laptop.
If I had to buy an Intel laptop it would have to be either an IBM ThinkPad or a Toshiba. IBM builds their laptops like tanks and don't waste on asthetics. "ThinkBricks" are very solid and look like hand-sized versions of the 2001 monolith. My kid once stood on a closed ThinkBrick and he did not crack the screen, even if at the time he was 35 pounds.
Of course, you may want to consider using Virtual PC 6. I have it on my Titanium Powerbook and runs Windows 2000 Pro without issues (I need it for SQL Server's enterprise manager and the query analyzer). I tried VPC on the iBook 600 with 384MB and it was too slow, with the Ti Book 867 it has 512MB so it runs much smoother.
If you assume that it will take the satellite company a couple years to come up with a fix for the security break, and a frooglepoopillion people get satellite for free, it will easily surpass their damage estimate.
Also, its not going to be just $500/month. Since he is gonna have to take their payment plan, they will probably tackle interest on top of it.
LRP was a good alternative when we were given the choice between blowing a couple grand on a new router or using LRP with an obsolete PC that nobody at the office wanted to use. Cheap PC + labor to get LRP configured was less than what it would have cost us to bring a real router.
The problem is that is not the case anymore. Our new T1 here uses a $500 netopia router that took just a few hours to get setup properly (this was mostly due to poor implementation support, we were promised the telco would configure the router and we would only have to plug it in). Even with the trouble we had I would not hesitate to use that kind of router again, instead of trying to build one from scratch with something like LRP.
The only time the artists could get away with this is with bonafide concept albums. The classic examples are Pink Floyd's The Wall and Dark Side of The Moon, both conceptualized to be listened as a whole unit and not sliced into singles. I personally hate every time I hear "Money" in a fake classics radio station (or worse, "Another Brick in the Wall II").
This is of course personal taste. Business wise, if I am an artist I would rather get my cut of a 99-cent download than NOT get my cut of a retail CD or a bundled download.
I am a web developer but since I am the only technical person in the company (15 employees, ceo and president are a married couple) I end up taking care of all IT. In my previous job IT meant 99.99% Microsoft stuff. Here it is two windows servers, two windows desktops and at least 15 mac desktops. Oh yes, and a freeBSD mail server.
I am noticing that it annoys me less and less to spend the day dealing with IT issues instead of writing code. It's also a lot of hands-on experience I was not getting before. I always assumed I would spin off my own company after I had enough non-programming experience (just because you have been a programmer 15 yrs does not make you qualified to open a programmer business by yourself) but lately I realized theres a lot of technical stuff you always take for granted.
For example, buying a new office phone system is a pain in the ass. Or switching from tapping into somebody elses network (we paid him $500/month, total ripoff) to having your own T1. Or trying to turn on the firewall rules on a goddamn Netopia 4522xl with crappy documentation and conflicting advise from SECOND tier tech support.
I guess most of us will be toeing that line. Most web devs I know are stuck managing their own servers because their clients are too cheap to hire proper help to get their servers setup. And this is stupid stuff like installing a sql server or locking up the SMTP in IIS so it does not end up being abused as an open relay, that kind of thing. Mention Oracle or Sendmail and they freak out.
If your company is desperate enough to screw itself with a work schedule they know won't work, then you need to bail. And don't wait til the work schedule eats you up, just bail.
Weare all familiar with how customers screw us during the life of a project. They wait til it is too late to sign the statement of work, push our net 30 to net 45 or worse, come up at the last second with mods we never agreed with and are NOT in the contract, etc. All these are normal. The problem is when your company lets the customers screw them even before the contract is signed. Just because they are your biggest client it is no excuse to risk losing money on the contract just to keep them happy. The customer knows exactly what they are doing, and if you let them do it now they will do it again and again.
Back at my previous job we had a lot of business with about 5 divisions of a huge american conglomerate. My programmers used to hate working on these projects because the internal clients sucked. I started keeping track of all these separate customers (I was managing the programming team but was not project manager, so I did not have day-to-day contact with all the clients) and noticed a disturbing trend: except for a wild variation in the mood of the customer, all of them tried to screw us with the same excuses and delays! I started digging around and found out ALL employees that have responsibility over software projects are trained by that company in how to intimidate small shops into this kind of behavior!
Don't be misled by all the BS talk about the economy going to the crapper. There are tons of jobs out there! It took me over a month to find a good consultant to offload some of my excess work because there are not enough good programmers out on the street.
>>How will my Mom feel when she can't check her mutual funds using her Macintosh because the browser isn't compatible?
Or how do I feel every time Safari gets hosed in a redirect, like when you log into a site that runs openwebmail (http://openwebmail.org)?
Or how do feel after submitting a DNS change request to NETSOL 3 times in a row and nothing happens, and then it works on IE on the first shot?
Or what about the 1-in-5 chance of crashing Safari just by minimizing it?
I absolutely love Safari, it is really really good, but I really hope they fix the redirects and the minimize, these two keep it from being workable. Right now the only reason I use IE on my mac is because the company that we use to run our web-based timesheets explicitly blocks Safari.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, I told you it bothered me!
It is probably a BS explanation, or maybe the recruiter was sick of people calling expecting to nail a job in India with an american salary plus relocation. That is just for starters. I bet he did not even bother checking out with the Indian embassy or a local consulate to check on work permit/visa requirements.
In the second half of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series, a new law is enacted, the Trade Reform Act. The law is really simple, it allows the president to pick a country with unfair trade laws and mirror them. They want to inspect every car that arrives at the dock? Sure, we'll do the same. They won't hire americans to work at their code shops? Ok, we'll do the same. This of couse triggers two wars in the series, but the core concept of the law was pretty solid.
I am well aware of the economics of outsourcing to India, my previous employer spent at least 6 months being courted by a half dozen code shops in India. They were complete professionals and very flexible. The skillset was in place, the language skills were better than what we want to believe and the price advantage was good. *That* I can live with.
What it is bothering me is this statement that it is illegal for an american to work in India. I mean, the only thing they had to do was say suuuure, come work for us, but you will get an indian salary commesurate with your skills and experience, we cannot pay you a US salary just because you are an american. That would be fair for everyone involved.
Or somebody in the government should wake up and see all these american going out of work because their jobs are going overseas. This of course sounds horribly naive on my part, but what is going to happen with defense sensitive software development? Are we going to outsource it too?
Some kind of trade reform act would be a great way to wake up India, China and Japan about the real meaning of trade. They can't expect to continue flooding us with cheap products and labor and then taking their profits and spending them elsewhere.
Please please please please please!
That embarrassing begging display aside, I would really love if somebody would figure out how to add extra functionality to the SMC Barricade wireless routers. At the very least, something to push the logs to a machine elsewhere in the network, as its current archival options are very limited. This is something my old Linksys router was able to do.
Which means we now have a full confession (which btw is notarized too) AND a photo id. Ouch. We gotcha.
Ms Entourage v.X allows you to set links between any of its objects. It also allows you to set more than one category per item, and you can setup custom views to combine these at your leisure. The links are great because on top of the obvious linking to the contacts, you can link to tasks, calendar events, notes. etc.
I took delivery of two Dell 600 CS servers a few months ago and they both had the clickthru license. I thought it was the bios but the first boot for the second box was from a OS install CD and the license did not show up like when I booted the first box.
An orderwire is a 75Khz carrier that can transmit either one-way voice or teletype data. It is the smallest communications signal you send over satellite
Back in my days as a satellite network controller for the Army it was common knowledge all it takes to saturate the whole frequency range for the commo payload is a nice 75Khz spike (enough carrier for a FM orderwire signal). People would argue it could not be done since we pretty much owned the 7.25->8.4 GHZ spectrum, but it worked pretty damn well. This is the equivalent of saturating a T1 with a 14.4 modem.
Especially if you are a programmer. At least a sys admin can get away witih saying no maybe 10% of the time. The second a programmer says no he has attitude and teamwork issues and eventually becomes Fredo's Kiss of Death.
... but if we do it this way we can get the same result."
There was a time when it was possible for us programmers to hide behind a project manager whenever the requests were unreasonable or just did not make common sense, but that is no more. When the mass layoffs started the first thing that happened was at least half of these project managers got the axe and many programmers got stuck in PM duties. This is why to many of us this job is turning us into politicians, because it is the only way to survive.
Of course, one could get high and mighty, but the only thing one would get out of this is a pink slip or a bad performance review (like it just happened to me).
The only possible escape is instead of just plain saying no, to deflect the issue with alternative approaches to the problem. What sounds better? "Can't be done.", or "This is not going to work because of
I have CDRs that are 5 years or older and still readable. The ones that have lasted the longer are the ones I kept in a cold, dark place. The ones I left in paper sleeves or Case Logic binders looked like crap within weeks.
I also have retail CDs that are less than 5 years old and have CD rot, so don't think you are safe just because the CD was pressed instead of burned.
Uhm, I run MS Office v.X on OS X 10.2. I have never had a compatibility issue with any user of MS Office 2000 and MS Office XP that has tried to open one of my documents.
The only thing v.X was lacking was in support for Exchange, and we don't use Exchange here so I could care less (plus Microsoft just started adding support to Exchange about a week or two ago).
Hell, I even got Virtual PC 6 but I only use it when I have to manage a SQL Server and terminal services is turned off. Between that and samba I have no constraints from working from a mac.
My previous employer got purchased by a dot-com "umbrella" company a couple years ago. At the same time they bought one of these Mormon companies in Provo (probably 99% of the employees were Mormon).
That company was making a ton of money before our parent company bought them. They knew what the hell they were doing. Where is the company now? Bankrupt. Why? Because of the external interference of the parent company, telling the locals how to run their company. Had our parent company (which btw, also managed to run ours into the ground too) left them alone they would have continued to make bundles of cash.
The only problem I had with the Mormons on my trips to Provo is the whole caffeine thing. Not a goddamn Starbucks anywhere around Provo! I had to either drive to the next town and settle for the Barnes & Noble coffee shop, or drive to Park City, which has at least 5 Starbucks the last time I checked.
This whole Ximian mess looks like something I will be reading over at fuckedcompany.com really soon. Ouch.
If and when they pull off the logistics involved, they will not only nail that gross margin right on the money, but will shock the rest of the industry into following suit. $35,000 is not an obscene amount of money for a car nowadays, and the exotic aspect of so much customization is offset by the fact most of the componentry is mass-produced. If your power steering pump blows up, you can pick one at any auto parts store instead of having to special order it to Japan or Germany.
Car makers already use "just in time" inventories because they only spend for inventory the bare minum they will neeed over the next few hours. Land shipping becomes critical because parts arrive at the assembly lines right as the inventory nears zero.
Once they get name recognition with their boutique car, they can figure out a way to sell a cheap car that just has air conditioning,removable mp3 player and scotchguard sealed seats and then sell it to college students for less than $10,000.
Don't bother lecturing to them about the evils of commercial software, big corps and the like. Try a common sense approach and see how far you can push it.
1. Show them in MS Office how easy it is to type a letter or to do home budget spreadsheet. Then show them how to do it with OpenOffice or KOffice. Then tell them the price of each, including what happens if they have more than one PC in the house.
2. Show them how easy it is to install Windows XP or SuSe (or Drake). Or let's push this one a bit farther: Show them how a pc they thought it was old and obsolete comes back to life as a web surfing station with free software you either downloaded from the web or it came in a CD with a magazine.
3. Show them the iApps in Mac OS X.
4. Demonstrate how there is virtually a website about every possible subject you can come up with. Dare them to the Google challenge!
The important thing is to show them there is always an alternative for what they are trying to do. If they are scared of computers because of past experiences, OS X 10.2, XP and Lindows can help turn them around.
If flexible scheduling is an option, use it for what it's worth. If getting the job done means working in the middle of the night and your output is optimal by doing this, then do it. The best programmer I have ever employed was like that: his muse usually got active around 11 PM and he would usually code until 6 AM or so. Because of this we kept him on flex time and tried not to call him at home before noon. He would do emails and follow-ups in the afternoon and then start programming again around midnight.
When *I* was on flex, I was a bit different. I would wake up around 7 AM, do email until 9 AM or so, then drove to the office for 4 hours, which helped me skip the morning traffic jams. Back at home before 3 PM meant no afternoon traffic jams either. Goof around til early evening and then code from 7:30 PM or so until 1-2 AM.
If flex and telecommuting are not an option, the best thing is to get buy-in from your manager to block out your schedule from non-project intrusions. I now work for a 15-person firm, and I am the only programmer here, plus I have to provide IT support. Whenever I am forced to switch to full-programmer mode the ops manager pretty much builds a wall around me. Anyone that needs me for non-programming tasks needs to go thru her first. This cuts distractions by 75% and I can work 45-hour weeks instead of 60+.
A warning on late-night coding binges: watch out for your health. I don't have a sleeping cycle anymore thanks to 8 years of graveyard shift plus 3 years of flex-time. I have been on a 9-5 schedule for a year and I still have no hope of a regular sleep schedule. Your circadian rhythm will get shot to hell if you are not careful. Also, be careful with the caffeine binges and snacking!
When and where did you do yours? I noticed that the game's qualification range for the M16A2 is missing "Fast Freddie" targets. At least that's what we called the shoulders-up pop-up that is usually placed less than 100 meters from the firing position. The game is set in Ft. Benning but my basic was in Ft. Jackson so I don't know if this is just a location issue or if it was dropped altogether from the design of the firing range.
B.R.A.S. =
Breathe
Relax
Aim
Squeeze
At least that was the mantra for basic rifle marksmanship when I went thru Army Basic Training almost 11 yrs ago. The way you practice this is by dry-firing the M16A2 (I actually had an A1 issued by accident but the bastards caught me on my first day out in the range, dammit!). You put a dime on top of the deflector and you try to squeeze the trigger without dropping the penny.
I switched from XP Pro to an iBook 600 with Jaguar on September last year, then replaced it with a Ti Book 867 (also Jaguar) this past April. I totally feel your pain with the issue of picking an Intel laptop.
If I had to buy an Intel laptop it would have to be either an IBM ThinkPad or a Toshiba. IBM builds their laptops like tanks and don't waste on asthetics. "ThinkBricks" are very solid and look like hand-sized versions of the 2001 monolith. My kid once stood on a closed ThinkBrick and he did not crack the screen, even if at the time he was 35 pounds.
Of course, you may want to consider using Virtual PC 6. I have it on my Titanium Powerbook and runs Windows 2000 Pro without issues (I need it for SQL Server's enterprise manager and the query analyzer). I tried VPC on the iBook 600 with 384MB and it was too slow, with the Ti Book 867 it has 512MB so it runs much smoother.
If you assume that it will take the satellite company a couple years to come up with a fix for the security break, and a frooglepoopillion people get satellite for free, it will easily surpass their damage estimate.
Also, its not going to be just $500/month. Since he is gonna have to take their payment plan, they will probably tackle interest on top of it.
LRP was a good alternative when we were given the choice between blowing a couple grand on a new router or using LRP with an obsolete PC that nobody at the office wanted to use. Cheap PC + labor to get LRP configured was less than what it would have cost us to bring a real router.
The problem is that is not the case anymore. Our new T1 here uses a $500 netopia router that took just a few hours to get setup properly (this was mostly due to poor implementation support, we were promised the telco would configure the router and we would only have to plug it in). Even with the trouble we had I would not hesitate to use that kind of router again, instead of trying to build one from scratch with something like LRP.
The only time the artists could get away with this is with bonafide concept albums. The classic examples are Pink Floyd's The Wall and Dark Side of The Moon, both conceptualized to be listened as a whole unit and not sliced into singles. I personally hate every time I hear "Money" in a fake classics radio station (or worse, "Another Brick in the Wall II").
This is of course personal taste. Business wise, if I am an artist I would rather get my cut of a 99-cent download than NOT get my cut of a retail CD or a bundled download.
I am a web developer but since I am the only technical person in the company (15 employees, ceo and president are a married couple) I end up taking care of all IT. In my previous job IT meant 99.99% Microsoft stuff. Here it is two windows servers, two windows desktops and at least 15 mac desktops. Oh yes, and a freeBSD mail server.
I am noticing that it annoys me less and less to spend the day dealing with IT issues instead of writing code. It's also a lot of hands-on experience I was not getting before. I always assumed I would spin off my own company after I had enough non-programming experience (just because you have been a programmer 15 yrs does not make you qualified to open a programmer business by yourself) but lately I realized theres a lot of technical stuff you always take for granted.
For example, buying a new office phone system is a pain in the ass. Or switching from tapping into somebody elses network (we paid him $500/month, total ripoff) to having your own T1. Or trying to turn on the firewall rules on a goddamn Netopia 4522xl with crappy documentation and conflicting advise from SECOND tier tech support.
I guess most of us will be toeing that line. Most web devs I know are stuck managing their own servers because their clients are too cheap to hire proper help to get their servers setup. And this is stupid stuff like installing a sql server or locking up the SMTP in IIS so it does not end up being abused as an open relay, that kind of thing. Mention Oracle or Sendmail and they freak out.
Jeez, funny you mention your kid. This whole mess too reminds me of my 4-yr old boy testing how much he can get away with.
If your company is desperate enough to screw itself with a work schedule they know won't work, then you need to bail. And don't wait til the work schedule eats you up, just bail.
Weare all familiar with how customers screw us during the life of a project. They wait til it is too late to sign the statement of work, push our net 30 to net 45 or worse, come up at the last second with mods we never agreed with and are NOT in the contract, etc. All these are normal. The problem is when your company lets the customers screw them even before the contract is signed. Just because they are your biggest client it is no excuse to risk losing money on the contract just to keep them happy. The customer knows exactly what they are doing, and if you let them do it now they will do it again and again.
Back at my previous job we had a lot of business with about 5 divisions of a huge american conglomerate. My programmers used to hate working on these projects because the internal clients sucked. I started keeping track of all these separate customers (I was managing the programming team but was not project manager, so I did not have day-to-day contact with all the clients) and noticed a disturbing trend: except for a wild variation in the mood of the customer, all of them tried to screw us with the same excuses and delays! I started digging around and found out ALL employees that have responsibility over software projects are trained by that company in how to intimidate small shops into this kind of behavior!
Don't be misled by all the BS talk about the economy going to the crapper. There are tons of jobs out there! It took me over a month to find a good consultant to offload some of my excess work because there are not enough good programmers out on the street.
>>How will my Mom feel when she can't check her mutual funds using her Macintosh because the browser isn't compatible?
Or how do I feel every time Safari gets hosed in a redirect, like when you log into a site that runs openwebmail (http://openwebmail.org)?
Or how do feel after submitting a DNS change request to NETSOL 3 times in a row and nothing happens, and then it works on IE on the first shot?
Or what about the 1-in-5 chance of crashing Safari just by minimizing it?
I absolutely love Safari, it is really really good, but I really hope they fix the redirects and the minimize, these two keep it from being workable. Right now the only reason I use IE on my mac is because the company that we use to run our web-based timesheets explicitly blocks Safari.