Until their quarterly profits fall below expectations, and then you realize that what you thought was a career was just a job, you muse about the non existent difference in your way out of the building while carrying your belongings in a cardboard box.
There are 3 issues that interest me from this post:
First, If there was no agreement for you to do that work (either implied or explicit) then why did you do it? It is as simple as that really. You did it, thus it should be assumed that it was from the goodness of your own heart and that you have no expectation of reward, because if you did it in order to try to ambush your company into paying you that would be unethical, and we should assume you are not that kind of person, you assumed the role of provider of free labour freely, then accept the consequences graciously.
What baffles me is that if you had free time it would have been dead simple to add an extension to your term of employment to do the work you did on company time in terms that were clear to all.
This brings me to the second point: job descriptions. I just can't believe that in this day and age geeks on this website are whining about having a precise job description.
I don't know where you chaps have worked, but clearly is mostly in small shops, in the places where I have served (with distinction I should say) they always had precise job descriptions for the different people in IT.
So System Administrators did not do application or website programming, programmers didn't do DB administration, and DBAs did not run around fixing people's PCs, and hardware technicians were not fixing problems with Windows. Computing technology has grown so vast that somebody telling me he can do anything and everything in the field should be seen with suspicion in my opinion, any company asking one person to take many roles at once should be seen as fools or poor (and here I say, charity starts at home when it comes to corporations).
Job descriptions are the best safeguard against you being exploited chaps, spare me the helping the company nonsense please, unless it is your own company financed with your own money, this helping the company, working for free, doing things you should not be doing, just cheapens the profession, giving the bean counters the impression that we should be paid badly for as much work as we can stomach (are you on call for free? Working out of hours without compensation? Then sir, you are a fool).
Even if your job fulfils you so much that you would do it for free, you are a professional (aren't you?) And professionals don't work for free.
Which brings me neatly to my last point: individuals financing with their time commercial interests, often vast and multinational. It is like a beggar helping a banker. Give me a bloody brake folks. The company (any company) will churn you out at the first sign of quarterly misfortune. The workplace has changed substantially in the last 25 years, loyalty is measured only in the basis of a mutually advantageous commercial exchange, if you are giving your time for free thus losing time with your family, friends, and most importantly yourself, you clearly have not been paying attention to how companies behave with their workers....
I can only imagine that most people replying with derision about metrics have never been in the position of having to justify what they are doing, and when they have been they have acted dishonestly.
People that actually work in the real world, with real companies with real budgets, and that have some self respect, honesty and pride in what they do will have to justify their salaries or rates somehow, and one of the tools used is some kind of metrics.
A professional will find metrics that are meaningful to both their team and their bosses or paymasters, and contrary to what most people are implying here, they can be quite useful to identify reasons for which a team is overworked and maybe bring somebody else on board.
It should also be pointed out that proper metrics may point to a team that is overstaffed, but an honest professional should not fear this since drawing a salary for doing nothing is frankly not my idea of a honest day's work (those people asking to make up or game the metrics simply are unethical, if you think metrics are a sham then do please suggest how you intend to evaluate obejectively if you are becoming better or worst at doing your job).
I have always wondered why more companies don't use Slashdot own software.
Most email that appears to be useless appears so because it is difficult to follow complex issues in a non threaded medium.
Once a discussion becomes threaded it is much simpler to get clarification to the right question at the right moment (and you don't get tons of email with replies that you don't really need to read).
Another means is to have an internal news website, where important announcements are posted and a short reminder or summary about the days topics are sent, instead of sending one message per announcement.
As for people using email as their main tool for monitoring systems, they have my full and undivided contempt.
I suggest a normal person with varied interests and in employment won't watch more than 2 DVD's per week on average (and with TV, movies, music, gaming, Internet and other exotic activities like going to concerts, doing sports, or reading a book requiring our time, I reckon the number may be smaller. Have you got kids? You watch more than 2 DVDs a week, but I guess you are tired by now of watching Toy Story yet again).
So lets say you will watch 100 DVDs this year. All of them only once. And most of them, perhaps all, will never be seen again ever, because you have other 100 to watch next year.
At this time of the year if you have a DVD "collection" what I suggest you should be doing is to get rid of half of it in order to make space for next year 100 DVDs.
The situation does not change much if these DVDs are in your computer (or server farm, whatever).. YOu won't watch most of it ever anymore.
So my solution is keep a collection of 100 and be scrupulous about this: a new disk gets in one gets out. It is that simple. Eventually you build a real collection of movies that you may watch sometime again. Keep the collection in a shelf, alphabetically, and forget the bloody computer and ripping: you have better things to do with your life (I hope).
When you take a photograph the most important factors on its quality are lighting and composition (did I mention quality of the equipment? Nope).
If you have good lighting pretty much any camera with standard settings will produce decent images.
The composition of your picture is the 2nd most important factor (where to locate the subject on the frame, evaluating different points of view, paying attention to what is actually in the frame).
My suggestion is that you buy the simplest camera you can find and invest the money the geekdom here are suggesting in a course of introduction to photography.
When I read all the above comments I can only think of those people that carry a very expensive camera wherever they go and then take a night picture of somebody with flash on (I think flash should always be turned off as factory default: flash is to be used only if you know what you are doing).
Recently I was in a birthday party, and the best pictures (as praised by people attending on the day) were taken with my mobile phone (against people bringing they P&S, some of them very fancy, and DSLRs).
What did I do? I asked people to get close to the window and then I closed the translucent curtain, thus I got a natural soft light that gave lots of character to the portraits I took (HTC phone, you don't *need* an iPhone).
Other people with their expensive cameras were battling with settings, flash (putting subjects with their back to the windows in a very bright day) etc.
If you want good pictures and are a newbie it is much easier to do so if your camera is simple and you concentrate in the basics.
The real economy in Mexico keeps moving and the immense majority of the population does not experience any violence at all, politics proceeds as usual, and even today's tragedy of losing the Government Minister to an accident (and the Education Minister having been diagnosed with cancer) won't bring things to a standstill, other people people will be named, and the business of government will continue as usual.
Of course the environment is tense and the situation is unacceptable and horrific, but Mexico is a big country and most of it leads a normal life.
I am not trying to minimize the situation: it is pretty bad, but it is a bad situation happening in a civilized country which is fighting back (scores of policemen are being fired if corruption is found, the army is on the streets since its command structures and loyalty are more reliable than the police's).
It is also noticeable that foreign governments, international organizations (G20 for example) and sports bodies (FIFA for example) see Mexico as a safe enough place to make business with.
Democracy is the only thing keeping cartels at bay.
Democracy was not the reason of the surge of cartels, lack of democracy contributed to their creation (Mexico was for many years run in a fashion not dissimilar form today's China: economic development without any democracy, we even had our little Tiananmen equivalent, the Tlatelolco massacre).
Lack of democracy in Mexico legitimized corruption (China is becoming quite corrupt as well) as a way to advance in society, this created a "each for himself" culture in which becoming a criminal to make ends meet made perfect sense.
Although violence happens everywhere (including Mexico City, 2 beheaded men were found last week a few minutes down the road from my home in Mexico City) it is not generalized.
Mexico City is certainly better than most, relatives of mine that live in Queretaro and Guadalajara report that these places remain peaceful to the point that some important companies are moving their local HQs there (Mexico City is getting just too crowded), the Yucatan peninsula (where Cancun is) is also quite peaceful (I have been there several times in the last 5 years and remains as enjoyable as ever).
Most of the violence is, surprise, surprise, in the border zone and has spilled mostly to Northern states and important coastal ones (Veracruz, Guerrero, Sinaloa) which are important routes of the drugs being trafficked to the US.
Mexico just organized the Soccer U-17 world cup and the Panamerican Games, amongst many other events, we have a working democracy (certainly threatened by the drug dealing business) and a vibrant cultural scene. To compare Mexico with Somalia just comes to show that some people really need to travel and read a bit more.
There are plenty of examples out there of places both on and offline where you can make friends, socialize and share experiences without inviting all the frigging world to the party.
As for anonymity, any old internet hat would tell you that communities can be created behind pseudonyms (gosh, had people already forgotten the Half Life craze?)
People for whom Facebook has been a feature of growing up have, mistakenly, assumed that it is OK to put your life in public for all to see, and most importantly, for anybody to find about.
People prosecuted for their political opinions. People under attack by stalkers and abusive partners. People with opinions that go against their society's norms and could be ostracised or worse. Gays. Whistleblowers.
And so on and so forth. Advocates for all these and other groups, often not technically inclined, have warned about the dangers of opening yourself to everybody and his dog on the net.
Here in/. we know that there are lots of dumb people (trolls, agitators, provocateurs, xenophobes, misogynists, racists, etc) hiding behind pseudonyms or anonimity (which/. manages elegantly by means of the moderation system).
The compensation, and why this website survives against all the odds, is that people with real insight in all manner of topics can come here, talk to their heart's content safe in the relative security of a nickname that will protect them from the nastiest aspects of the net, and the rest of us will be able to participate and reply to them.
But Google (I would say Schmidt, he is the guy that does not get the Internet after all) decided that they can bully users into open themselves to abuse and intrusion only to please the formerly "do no evil" juggernaut.
Well, guess what, that many early adopters, most of whom would not be ever caught close to their real names on the net for obvious reasons (most of them non malicious) decided that Google could keep their intrusive toy (ahem) all to themselves.
So in one quick stroke, Google scared away some of the most networked people in the planet and annoyed a good deal of them, who have been begging for a privacy respecting option to Facebook.
I am over googled, and now am starting a thorough de-googlefication program: they warned me my G+ account would be suspended, I decided to close it instead.
It is very easy to verify many people are annoyed by this, it is one of those blunders of Microsoftian proportions, the kind that earns you lots of bad will and people that vow to fight your influence at every step you take.
G+ created a problem Google didn't have: Google haters. I hope they enjoy it.
Slashdot Mirror
And surely you know that there is a tunnel or ferries that will gladly take your motorbike (or car, or truck) for a fee.
I just don't understand how can people get bored when they have free time....
... and provide affordable housing.
Do you want to see the shanty towns in other parts of the world?
Until their quarterly profits fall below expectations, and then you realize that what you thought was a career was just a job, you muse about the non existent difference in your way out of the building while carrying your belongings in a cardboard box.
So if you are hired as a System Administrator, and your boss tells you to mop the floors, or serve him a coffee, you just would do it?
Also what this chap did was not just a bit of code slinging...
There are 3 issues that interest me from this post:
First, If there was no agreement for you to do that work (either implied or explicit) then why did you do it? It is as simple as that really. You did it, thus it should be assumed that it was from the goodness of your own heart and that you have no expectation of reward, because if you did it in order to try to ambush your company into paying you that would be unethical, and we should assume you are not that kind of person, you assumed the role of provider of free labour freely, then accept the consequences graciously.
What baffles me is that if you had free time it would have been dead simple to add an extension to your term of employment to do the work you did on company time in terms that were clear to all.
This brings me to the second point: job descriptions. I just can't believe that in this day and age geeks on this website are whining about having a precise job description.
I don't know where you chaps have worked, but clearly is mostly in small shops, in the places where I have served (with distinction I should say) they always had precise job descriptions for the different people in IT.
So System Administrators did not do application or website programming, programmers didn't do DB administration, and DBAs did not run around fixing people's PCs, and hardware technicians were not fixing problems with Windows. Computing technology has grown so vast that somebody telling me he can do anything and everything in the field should be seen with suspicion in my opinion, any company asking one person to take many roles at once should be seen as fools or poor (and here I say, charity starts at home when it comes to corporations).
Job descriptions are the best safeguard against you being exploited chaps, spare me the helping the company nonsense please, unless it is your own company financed with your own money, this helping the company, working for free, doing things you should not be doing, just cheapens the profession, giving the bean counters the impression that we should be paid badly for as much work as we can stomach (are you on call for free? Working out of hours without compensation? Then sir, you are a fool).
Even if your job fulfils you so much that you would do it for free, you are a professional (aren't you?) And professionals don't work for free.
Which brings me neatly to my last point: individuals financing with their time commercial interests, often vast and multinational. It is like a beggar helping a banker. Give me a bloody brake folks. The company (any company) will churn you out at the first sign of quarterly misfortune. The workplace has changed substantially in the last 25 years, loyalty is measured only in the basis of a mutually advantageous commercial exchange, if you are giving your time for free thus losing time with your family, friends, and most importantly yourself, you clearly have not been paying attention to how companies behave with their workers....
Wake up people!
I can only imagine that most people replying with derision about metrics have never been in the position of having to justify what they are doing, and when they have been they have acted dishonestly.
People that actually work in the real world, with real companies with real budgets, and that have some self respect, honesty and pride in what they do will have to justify their salaries or rates somehow, and one of the tools used is some kind of metrics.
A professional will find metrics that are meaningful to both their team and their bosses or paymasters, and contrary to what most people are implying here, they can be quite useful to identify reasons for which a team is overworked and maybe bring somebody else on board.
It should also be pointed out that proper metrics may point to a team that is overstaffed, but an honest professional should not fear this since drawing a salary for doing nothing is frankly not my idea of a honest day's work (those people asking to make up or game the metrics simply are unethical, if you think metrics are a sham then do please suggest how you intend to evaluate obejectively if you are becoming better or worst at doing your job).
Then we can talk.
I have always wondered why more companies don't use Slashdot own software.
Most email that appears to be useless appears so because it is difficult to follow complex issues in a non threaded medium.
Once a discussion becomes threaded it is much simpler to get clarification to the right question at the right moment (and you don't get tons of email with replies that you don't really need to read).
Another means is to have an internal news website, where important announcements are posted and a short reminder or summary about the days topics are sent, instead of sending one message per announcement.
As for people using email as their main tool for monitoring systems, they have my full and undivided contempt.
How many DVDs can you watch?
7 a week? Really? Haven't you got a life?
I suggest a normal person with varied interests and in employment won't watch more than 2 DVD's per week on average (and with TV, movies, music, gaming, Internet and other exotic activities like going to concerts, doing sports, or reading a book requiring our time, I reckon the number may be smaller. Have you got kids? You watch more than 2 DVDs a week, but I guess you are tired by now of watching Toy Story yet again).
So lets say you will watch 100 DVDs this year. All of them only once. And most of them, perhaps all, will never be seen again ever, because you have other 100 to watch next year.
At this time of the year if you have a DVD "collection" what I suggest you should be doing is to get rid of half of it in order to make space for next year 100 DVDs.
The situation does not change much if these DVDs are in your computer (or server farm, whatever).. YOu won't watch most of it ever anymore.
So my solution is keep a collection of 100 and be scrupulous about this: a new disk gets in one gets out. It is that simple. Eventually you build a real collection of movies that you may watch sometime again. Keep the collection in a shelf, alphabetically, and forget the bloody computer and ripping: you have better things to do with your life (I hope).
When you take a photograph the most important factors on its quality are lighting and composition (did I mention quality of the equipment? Nope).
If you have good lighting pretty much any camera with standard settings will produce decent images.
The composition of your picture is the 2nd most important factor (where to locate the subject on the frame, evaluating different points of view, paying attention to what is actually in the frame).
My suggestion is that you buy the simplest camera you can find and invest the money the geekdom here are suggesting in a course of introduction to photography.
When I read all the above comments I can only think of those people that carry a very expensive camera wherever they go and then take a night picture of somebody with flash on (I think flash should always be turned off as factory default: flash is to be used only if you know what you are doing).
Recently I was in a birthday party, and the best pictures (as praised by people attending on the day) were taken with my mobile phone (against people bringing they P&S, some of them very fancy, and DSLRs).
What did I do? I asked people to get close to the window and then I closed the translucent curtain, thus I got a natural soft light that gave lots of character to the portraits I took (HTC phone, you don't *need* an iPhone).
Other people with their expensive cameras were battling with settings, flash (putting subjects with their back to the windows in a very bright day) etc.
If you want good pictures and are a newbie it is much easier to do so if your camera is simple and you concentrate in the basics.
... Cartier Bresson know.
This is an utter lie.
The real economy in Mexico keeps moving and the immense majority of the population does not experience any violence at all, politics proceeds as usual, and even today's tragedy of losing the Government Minister to an accident (and the Education Minister having been diagnosed with cancer) won't bring things to a standstill, other people people will be named, and the business of government will continue as usual.
Of course the environment is tense and the situation is unacceptable and horrific, but Mexico is a big country and most of it leads a normal life.
I am not trying to minimize the situation: it is pretty bad, but it is a bad situation happening in a civilized country which is fighting back (scores of policemen are being fired if corruption is found, the army is on the streets since its command structures and loyalty are more reliable than the police's).
It is also noticeable that foreign governments, international organizations (G20 for example) and sports bodies (FIFA for example) see Mexico as a safe enough place to make business with.
Democracy is the only thing keeping cartels at bay.
Democracy was not the reason of the surge of cartels, lack of democracy contributed to their creation (Mexico was for many years run in a fashion not dissimilar form today's China: economic development without any democracy, we even had our little Tiananmen equivalent, the Tlatelolco massacre).
Lack of democracy in Mexico legitimized corruption (China is becoming quite corrupt as well) as a way to advance in society, this created a "each for himself" culture in which becoming a criminal to make ends meet made perfect sense.
This is not true.
Although violence happens everywhere (including Mexico City, 2 beheaded men were found last week a few minutes down the road from my home in Mexico City) it is not generalized.
Mexico City is certainly better than most, relatives of mine that live in Queretaro and Guadalajara report that these places remain peaceful to the point that some important companies are moving their local HQs there (Mexico City is getting just too crowded), the Yucatan peninsula (where Cancun is) is also quite peaceful (I have been there several times in the last 5 years and remains as enjoyable as ever).
Most of the violence is, surprise, surprise, in the border zone and has spilled mostly to Northern states and important coastal ones (Veracruz, Guerrero, Sinaloa) which are important routes of the drugs being trafficked to the US.
Mexico just organized the Soccer U-17 world cup and the Panamerican Games, amongst many other events, we have a working democracy (certainly threatened by the drug dealing business) and a vibrant cultural scene. To compare Mexico with Somalia just comes to show that some people really need to travel and read a bit more.
Really, it is all there in the history books.
There are plenty of examples out there of places both on and offline where you can make friends, socialize and share experiences without inviting all the frigging world to the party.
As for anonymity, any old internet hat would tell you that communities can be created behind pseudonyms (gosh, had people already forgotten the Half Life craze?)
People for whom Facebook has been a feature of growing up have, mistakenly, assumed that it is OK to put your life in public for all to see, and most importantly, for anybody to find about.
This is so often repeated that is getting boring.
So CNN business is not news broadcasting it is advertising.
Or football teams that rename their stadiums and put advertisements on their kits are not in the sports business, but in advertising.
Cappice?
People prosecuted for their political opinions.
People under attack by stalkers and abusive partners.
People with opinions that go against their society's norms and could be ostracised or worse.
Gays.
Whistleblowers.
And so on and so forth. Advocates for all these and other groups, often not technically inclined, have warned about the dangers of opening yourself to everybody and his dog on the net.
Here in /. we know that there are lots of dumb people (trolls, agitators, provocateurs, xenophobes, misogynists, racists, etc) hiding behind pseudonyms or anonimity (which /. manages elegantly by means of the moderation system).
The compensation, and why this website survives against all the odds, is that people with real insight in all manner of topics can come here, talk to their heart's content safe in the relative security of a nickname that will protect them from the nastiest aspects of the net, and the rest of us will be able to participate and reply to them.
But Google (I would say Schmidt, he is the guy that does not get the Internet after all) decided that they can bully users into open themselves to abuse and intrusion only to please the formerly "do no evil" juggernaut.
Well, guess what, that many early adopters, most of whom would not be ever caught close to their real names on the net for obvious reasons (most of them non malicious) decided that Google could keep their intrusive toy (ahem) all to themselves.
So in one quick stroke, Google scared away some of the most networked people in the planet and annoyed a good deal of them, who have been begging for a privacy respecting option to Facebook.
I am over googled, and now am starting a thorough de-googlefication program: they warned me my G+ account would be suspended, I decided to close it instead.
It is very easy to verify many people are annoyed by this, it is one of those blunders of Microsoftian proportions, the kind that earns you lots of bad will and people that vow to fight your influence at every step you take.
G+ created a problem Google didn't have: Google haters. I hope they enjoy it.
It is not as good an experience as you think it may be.
... has moved freely irrespective of any other matters or the economic climate.
Refering to gold as a value standard bearer is just stupid, its value moves as anything else in a market.
It is gaming the broken patent registration system.
IBM can remain in the US with only US workers as long as it only sells stuff to US clients and nobody else.
What do you say?
I have abandoned business deals when the ethics of the deal were questionable.
Sorry to break this to you, but lack of morals is not an imperative to make business.