We have a number of people in our company who telecommute, but the developers are not in the number. We do work from home from time to time, which on the whole is more productive, but we also have to support the product, which is an internal product, and the people we support are in the office. So, it is advantageous to be in the office.
In at-will states you can eliminate anyONE at any time for NO reason. From a legal standpoint, a company should never have a reason to fire someone, because that reason may turn out to be invalid in a lawsuit. There are also labor laws about terminating a lot of people which require notice periods, and depending on the state and any union regulations, may also require severance packages, retraining or other benefits. Firing a lot of people also introduces lack of confidence in the company (although it usually initially causes the stock to go up, because people are idiots who can't think long term), and also may carry some hefty one time charges for severance packages.
That said, since this is a blanket ban I'm sure the baby is being thrown out with the bath water.
In attrition layoffs, ONLY the baby is thrown out. The bathwater is kept.
I can think of two reasons why VPN logs are not a useful measurement. One is that anybody could just login to VPN and then go watch TV all day. The other is that a developer usually had most if not all of the tools that they need to development on their laptop and doesn't need to VPN in to get access to resources. E-mail is the obvious outlier, but they could be getting e-mail through webmail, which almost every company supports.
Most of our development staff (who all work in the office by the way) prefer not to connect to the domain even at work, and use alternative e-mail solutions such as Thunderbird.
Our company has people who telecommute and they seem to work. Actually, they mostly just tell other people what to do, but that seems to be good enough for the company. They just fired another person who telecommuted and actually DID work. And then there are of course, the people who show up every day for work, but don't work. Like we have people who show up at 10, leave at 4 and go run errands 3 or 4 times a day. These sort of people earned us "the talk" last week, about how we have to be professional and be the example for the rest of the company. Rather than single out the two or three people for whom punctuality is a problem, they just pissed me off as well as the other people who show up shortly after 9 and then leave at 7 or 8 every night and go home and log back on and do more work.
Yes, but a U.S. citizen does not risk being deported and if they believe that all companies are screwing them they can attempt to start their own business. An H1B visa holder must find a job with a company that can sponsor their visa in order to stay in the country and they must do so within a time frame that is well-known to all such potential employers. If you are a U.S. citizen it is unlikely that your potential employer knows how much longer you can afford to be unemployed and thus has less negotiating leverage than they do with someone with an H1B visa.
This is why the companies are able to screw two people at once. They screw the H1B by paying them less than they could make elsewhere, knowing that the H1B has no choice AND they screw the local employee who would have had gotten that job if they hadn't hired an H1B instead.
When US companies go outside the priesthood and get overseas IT people because the locals don't meet their needs, then suddenly protectionism is awesome.
The locals would meet their needs, but the locals demand prevailing wages, and the companies would rather not pay that.
Yeah like how do you even tell the time on a phone?!
Easy, by spending more time on taking it out of your pocket and putting it back afterwards than on actually looking at the time....
What's really funny is how often I wonder what time it is, so I dig my phone out, then notice I have texts or e-mails or whatnot, then after checking that out, put the phone back in the holster, then several seconds later, I still wonder what time it is.
Are you doing that thing again where you look at budget items in non-inflation-adjusted dollars while at the same time bitching about all the inflation the administration is causing?
My salary is not automatically incremented by inflation, so why should theirs be? I have to get by on the same amount that I made 6 years ago. They need to learn to do so, too, or even less. Because they are the federal government, so they should only be in charge of things that need to be done at a national level,
While I agree with the sentiment, it does raise questions about "greatest country in the world", "land of the free", "bastion of freedom" etc.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and yes it concerns me very much, but whenever I get vocal about it on slashdot I get shot down by people who think the current regime can do no wrong.
I have enthusiasm for my craft and will often code my own projects in my free time. However, if I am doing it for a company and they are making money off of it, then I feel I should be compensated commensurate with my performance, and not commensurate with their arbitrary limits on what a developer can get paid.
Well I've worked in various states in the midwest, and they all have been set up with limits by HR on the salary ranges. Sometimes people get "promoted" to management just because they do a good job and their boss can't pay them any more. What new roles do they have? None. How many people do they manage? Zero. But it's the only way to pay people what the deserve. And, it's a benefit for HR as well, because by promoting the highest paid tech to being the lowest paid manager, now the average of both pay grades goes down, and the next guy they bring in, they can justify paying even less!
Businesses that I am familiar with are doing away with departmental budgets. They feel that if they establish a budget, the department manager will feel the need to spend all that money whether they need to or not. Also, what if an emergency came up and your department required a crap-ton of resources to get a major money maker project done? So instead of going with budgets, they are just having department heads go to the CEO every time somebody needs a pencil.
Last week I noticed some items missing from my front porch. I had installed a couple of game cameras to strategically catch my front door. Went back through and had 4 pictures of the guy taking stuff, and two were quite nice since they are 4 megapixel cameras.
Pictures got posted on FB (not by me actually, I hate FB) and I had a name for the sheriffs office by the next morning. Even found his FB page so we could compare pictures.
Wow, they probably had to work overtime just to ignore that evidence, but I'm sure in the end, that is what they did, or maybe put him in jail for a couple of hours and then let him go back out on the street, where you are now his #1 enemy.
The two reasons for people to go into management are absent here
1. Incompetence: Doing management is often a way for people that have no real skills with regard to the product being made to join or stay in an organization.
2. Lust for power: The other primary motivation for going into management is wanting to tell others what to do.
In bad managers (the predominant type), both things combine. Good engineers, artists, writers, etc. almost universally want to practice their craft and get better at it. Doing any management-like function is something they will only do willingly (and temporarily) for the greater good and never as their sole function. If you have such a pool of people, the only permanent (but critical) management function to remain is to make sure nobody incompetent at or not passionate for their (non-management) job and nobody with lust for power joins the team. People that are passionate about what they do are easy to identify. Skill is harder, but doable if you invest some time to find out. Lust for power is still harder, but people that have gotten good as their primary competency rarely have it as it gets into the way.
This also means that most companies cannot use this model, as they have been taken over a long time ago with those of no valuable skills and/or a craving for power and, from my observation, usually have quite a few incompetent non-managers in addition.
I submit that the most common reason why technical people go into management is not listed. That is: HR puts an arbitrary cap on what technical people can make and it is less than what managers make. In order to progress in your career and make more money, you have to go into management, and therefor remove yourself from the productivity pool. It seems counter-intuitive, but most everything that companies do is counter-intuitive.
Maybe they should buy insurance and not a health plan. Unfortunately, the government is trying to make you think health plans are insurance, so now we have a new term for what is actually supposed to be called insurance, and that term is "Major Medical". You get to participate in the insurance companies contracted rates, but you pay everything out of pocket up to a certain high deductible amount, and then the insurance pays the rest. This is the only kind of insurance that should be legal to sell. It ends up costing thousands of dollars less a year to the consumer even if they maxed out the deductible every year.
I'm normally not keen on the government telling us how to live our lives, but having mandatory liability coverage is a no-brainer for the vast majority of poor and middle-class citizens who simply can't be assumed to be responsible enough to have a personal insurance savings plan, and can't afford a huge payout if they do cause an accident. I'd rather pay $50/month to insure that I won't be sued and bankrupted because I made a mistake driving, than bank that money and hope that I've saved up enough to fight said lawsuit.
What's really intriguing is how insurance skyrocketed when they made it mandatory that everyone had it, when in effect you would assume that the pool got bigger and so costs should go down. Of course, making something legally required will absolutely ALWAYS result in higher prices, because what are you going to do, NOT buy it? And go to jail instead?
Even more interesting is how you also have to pay uninsured motorists coverage, even though insurance coverage is mandatory. Because the type of people that run into other people usually don't have insurance, and for some reason, even though they are saving thousands of dollars a year by not having insurance, they still can't afford to fix your car when they run into it.
If you're poor, how the fuck are you supposed to put money aside for a personal insurance savings plan?
Well, if you can afford to pay insurance including the insurance company's profit margin, then you should be able to afford to put the money aside yourself.
Traditional insurance assumes a payout of around 1% of people filing claims per year. The idea is you pay for decades and file one huge claim in that time that would bankrupt you otherwise
Only health insurance is structured for you to use as much or more of what you pay in premiums
Health Insurance works exactly like other insurance. The problem is that hardly anybody actually has health insurance, and the current administration is trying to get rid of health insurance in favor of health PLANS.
Smart of the insurance industry to make themselves useless. Now, if they never fork out, why should I have an insurance?
Because the bank requires that you pay for insurance as part of the mortgage.
Because the state requires that you pay for insurance to drive legally.
The insurances companies have been tremendously smart. Securing mandates that you pay more and more for their products, acquiring guarantees of profits, all while reducing their liability and payouts.
God help us if they ever make health insurance required.
The average geek has much larger pants than you or I it would seem. I personally don't want something larger than my 4S in my pocket.
Perhaps you are not aware that they make holsters for phones. I can't imagine putting my phone in my pocket. What a pain that would be. I don't wear saggy pants like most of the kids, so I actually would have to stand up to dig the phone out of my pocket if I needed it. Plus it would get scratched up and broken.
So Why not throw away whole stupid smartphone screen problem and take 7" size what is awesome to use for the "smart" part and have a phone with me for those few normal phone calls.
I think that is just what the manufacturers want. Why sell you one device to do everything when they could sell you two devices to do different things for twice the money.
I disagree with the premise that you have to be able to type with your thumb. I use both thumbs when I am typing, and in landscape mode. if people need to type with one thumb, they could do it in portrait mode, so the screen width is not as big and make it 2 inches wide by 300 feet tall, so that users can reach all of the keyboard. Or as you point out, put all of the button-y keyboard-y things in one small area and make the screen as big as you want.
I think the max size of the phone should be whatever size fits in your hand. That would be different from person to person. For me, it would be about 8 inches wide, by however tall they want to make it.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a number of people in our company who telecommute, but the developers are not in the number. We do work from home from time to time, which on the whole is more productive, but we also have to support the product, which is an internal product, and the people we support are in the office. So, it is advantageous to be in the office.
In at-will states you can eliminate anyONE at any time for NO reason. From a legal standpoint, a company should never have a reason to fire someone, because that reason may turn out to be invalid in a lawsuit. There are also labor laws about terminating a lot of people which require notice periods, and depending on the state and any union regulations, may also require severance packages, retraining or other benefits. Firing a lot of people also introduces lack of confidence in the company (although it usually initially causes the stock to go up, because people are idiots who can't think long term), and also may carry some hefty one time charges for severance packages.
Any displaced Java developers wanting to work in the Oklahoma City area, contact me. We're hiring.
That said, since this is a blanket ban I'm sure the baby is being thrown out with the bath water.
In attrition layoffs, ONLY the baby is thrown out. The bathwater is kept.
There was some mention they checked VPN logs...
I can think of two reasons why VPN logs are not a useful measurement. One is that anybody could just login to VPN and then go watch TV all day. The other is that a developer usually had most if not all of the tools that they need to development on their laptop and doesn't need to VPN in to get access to resources. E-mail is the obvious outlier, but they could be getting e-mail through webmail, which almost every company supports.
Most of our development staff (who all work in the office by the way) prefer not to connect to the domain even at work, and use alternative e-mail solutions such as Thunderbird.
Our company has people who telecommute and they seem to work. Actually, they mostly just tell other people what to do, but that seems to be good enough for the company. They just fired another person who telecommuted and actually DID work. And then there are of course, the people who show up every day for work, but don't work. Like we have people who show up at 10, leave at 4 and go run errands 3 or 4 times a day. These sort of people earned us "the talk" last week, about how we have to be professional and be the example for the rest of the company. Rather than single out the two or three people for whom punctuality is a problem, they just pissed me off as well as the other people who show up shortly after 9 and then leave at 7 or 8 every night and go home and log back on and do more work.
Yes, but a U.S. citizen does not risk being deported and if they believe that all companies are screwing them they can attempt to start their own business. An H1B visa holder must find a job with a company that can sponsor their visa in order to stay in the country and they must do so within a time frame that is well-known to all such potential employers. If you are a U.S. citizen it is unlikely that your potential employer knows how much longer you can afford to be unemployed and thus has less negotiating leverage than they do with someone with an H1B visa.
This is why the companies are able to screw two people at once. They screw the H1B by paying them less than they could make elsewhere, knowing that the H1B has no choice AND they screw the local employee who would have had gotten that job if they hadn't hired an H1B instead.
When US companies go outside the priesthood and get overseas IT people because the locals don't meet their needs, then suddenly protectionism is awesome.
The locals would meet their needs, but the locals demand prevailing wages, and the companies would rather not pay that.
Remember Swatches? They were cool when I was a kid. Some people would wear 5 or 6 of them at a time.
Yeah like how do you even tell the time on a phone?!
Easy, by spending more time on taking it out of your pocket and putting it back afterwards than on actually looking at the time....
What's really funny is how often I wonder what time it is, so I dig my phone out, then notice I have texts or e-mails or whatnot, then after checking that out, put the phone back in the holster, then several seconds later, I still wonder what time it is.
Are you doing that thing again where you look at budget items in non-inflation-adjusted dollars while at the same time bitching about all the inflation the administration is causing?
My salary is not automatically incremented by inflation, so why should theirs be? I have to get by on the same amount that I made 6 years ago. They need to learn to do so, too, or even less. Because they are the federal government, so they should only be in charge of things that need to be done at a national level,
While I agree with the sentiment, it does raise questions about "greatest country in the world", "land of the free", "bastion of freedom" etc.
I'm inclined to agree with you, and yes it concerns me very much, but whenever I get vocal about it on slashdot I get shot down by people who think the current regime can do no wrong.
I have enthusiasm for my craft and will often code my own projects in my free time. However, if I am doing it for a company and they are making money off of it, then I feel I should be compensated commensurate with my performance, and not commensurate with their arbitrary limits on what a developer can get paid.
Well I've worked in various states in the midwest, and they all have been set up with limits by HR on the salary ranges. Sometimes people get "promoted" to management just because they do a good job and their boss can't pay them any more. What new roles do they have? None. How many people do they manage? Zero. But it's the only way to pay people what the deserve. And, it's a benefit for HR as well, because by promoting the highest paid tech to being the lowest paid manager, now the average of both pay grades goes down, and the next guy they bring in, they can justify paying even less!
Businesses that I am familiar with are doing away with departmental budgets. They feel that if they establish a budget, the department manager will feel the need to spend all that money whether they need to or not. Also, what if an emergency came up and your department required a crap-ton of resources to get a major money maker project done? So instead of going with budgets, they are just having department heads go to the CEO every time somebody needs a pencil.
Well, one reason could be that gun-free zones like NYC and Chicago are supposed to be crime-free.
But they're not. They're worse.
Of course they're worse. The criminals know that nobody in those cities is able to defend themselves. It's a free-for-all.
Last week I noticed some items missing from my front porch. I had installed a couple of game cameras to strategically catch my front door. Went back through and had 4 pictures of the guy taking stuff, and two were quite nice since they are 4 megapixel cameras.
Pictures got posted on FB (not by me actually, I hate FB) and I had a name for the sheriffs office by the next morning. Even found his FB page so we could compare pictures.
Wow, they probably had to work overtime just to ignore that evidence, but I'm sure in the end, that is what they did, or maybe put him in jail for a couple of hours and then let him go back out on the street, where you are now his #1 enemy.
The two reasons for people to go into management are absent here 1. Incompetence: Doing management is often a way for people that have no real skills with regard to the product being made to join or stay in an organization. 2. Lust for power: The other primary motivation for going into management is wanting to tell others what to do.
In bad managers (the predominant type), both things combine. Good engineers, artists, writers, etc. almost universally want to practice their craft and get better at it. Doing any management-like function is something they will only do willingly (and temporarily) for the greater good and never as their sole function. If you have such a pool of people, the only permanent (but critical) management function to remain is to make sure nobody incompetent at or not passionate for their (non-management) job and nobody with lust for power joins the team. People that are passionate about what they do are easy to identify. Skill is harder, but doable if you invest some time to find out. Lust for power is still harder, but people that have gotten good as their primary competency rarely have it as it gets into the way.
This also means that most companies cannot use this model, as they have been taken over a long time ago with those of no valuable skills and/or a craving for power and, from my observation, usually have quite a few incompetent non-managers in addition.
I submit that the most common reason why technical people go into management is not listed. That is: HR puts an arbitrary cap on what technical people can make and it is less than what managers make. In order to progress in your career and make more money, you have to go into management, and therefor remove yourself from the productivity pool. It seems counter-intuitive, but most everything that companies do is counter-intuitive.
Maybe they should buy insurance and not a health plan. Unfortunately, the government is trying to make you think health plans are insurance, so now we have a new term for what is actually supposed to be called insurance, and that term is "Major Medical". You get to participate in the insurance companies contracted rates, but you pay everything out of pocket up to a certain high deductible amount, and then the insurance pays the rest. This is the only kind of insurance that should be legal to sell. It ends up costing thousands of dollars less a year to the consumer even if they maxed out the deductible every year.
I'm normally not keen on the government telling us how to live our lives, but having mandatory liability coverage is a no-brainer for the vast majority of poor and middle-class citizens who simply can't be assumed to be responsible enough to have a personal insurance savings plan, and can't afford a huge payout if they do cause an accident. I'd rather pay $50/month to insure that I won't be sued and bankrupted because I made a mistake driving, than bank that money and hope that I've saved up enough to fight said lawsuit.
What's really intriguing is how insurance skyrocketed when they made it mandatory that everyone had it, when in effect you would assume that the pool got bigger and so costs should go down. Of course, making something legally required will absolutely ALWAYS result in higher prices, because what are you going to do, NOT buy it? And go to jail instead?
Even more interesting is how you also have to pay uninsured motorists coverage, even though insurance coverage is mandatory. Because the type of people that run into other people usually don't have insurance, and for some reason, even though they are saving thousands of dollars a year by not having insurance, they still can't afford to fix your car when they run into it.
If you're poor, how the fuck are you supposed to put money aside for a personal insurance savings plan?
Well, if you can afford to pay insurance including the insurance company's profit margin, then you should be able to afford to put the money aside yourself.
Traditional insurance assumes a payout of around 1% of people filing claims per year. The idea is you pay for decades and file one huge claim in that time that would bankrupt you otherwise
Only health insurance is structured for you to use as much or more of what you pay in premiums
Health Insurance works exactly like other insurance. The problem is that hardly anybody actually has health insurance, and the current administration is trying to get rid of health insurance in favor of health PLANS.
Smart of the insurance industry to make themselves useless. Now, if they never fork out, why should I have an insurance?
Because the bank requires that you pay for insurance as part of the mortgage.
Because the state requires that you pay for insurance to drive legally.
The insurances companies have been tremendously smart. Securing mandates that you pay more and more for their products, acquiring guarantees of profits, all while reducing their liability and payouts.
God help us if they ever make health insurance required.
The average geek has much larger pants than you or I it would seem. I personally don't want something larger than my 4S in my pocket.
Perhaps you are not aware that they make holsters for phones. I can't imagine putting my phone in my pocket. What a pain that would be. I don't wear saggy pants like most of the kids, so I actually would have to stand up to dig the phone out of my pocket if I needed it. Plus it would get scratched up and broken.
So Why not throw away whole stupid smartphone screen problem and take 7" size what is awesome to use for the "smart" part and have a phone with me for those few normal phone calls.
I think that is just what the manufacturers want. Why sell you one device to do everything when they could sell you two devices to do different things for twice the money.
I disagree with the premise that you have to be able to type with your thumb. I use both thumbs when I am typing, and in landscape mode. if people need to type with one thumb, they could do it in portrait mode, so the screen width is not as big and make it 2 inches wide by 300 feet tall, so that users can reach all of the keyboard. Or as you point out, put all of the button-y keyboard-y things in one small area and make the screen as big as you want. I think the max size of the phone should be whatever size fits in your hand. That would be different from person to person. For me, it would be about 8 inches wide, by however tall they want to make it.