Setup somewhere with more pleasant weather than the south and you'll get people willing to leave the SF Bay area.
Look into the Seattle Area.
We just want:
Fair pay. i.e paid enough to afford a house.
Fair work. No sweat shops.
Interesting work. Why waste talent on mudane tasks.
I live in the SF Bay area because of the variety of work I get to do. I'm willing to leave and even earn less if I can buy a house and not live paycheck to paycheck.
When you did not get a response, you had 30 days from purchase for full protection and 60 days for partial protection to have the CC company challenge the charge.
They would have given you the refund and backcharge the reseller.
I'll start and say that the article is well written. But if your developers are not able to access kde, this wom't help much.
I am running a site with 8 repositories each with mulitple modules and different levels of users on different windows and unix's/linux.
The best client I found was smartCVS. The latest beta has great diff, mergs and conflict tool built in. Beats tha pant's off WinCVS and tortoise.
It also presents operations so that non-technical users can easily learn the basics.
four of my friends have it and it works great.
they now have 911 service in most areas. This is important to check on. Some services do not let you connect to 911 or 411.
If you get a business accounts, you even get a fax line as part of the service.
You can transfer your current pstn phone number.
Voice quality is at least a good as PSTN. See QOS notes below.
They used to send cisco-186 adapters for analog phone. I believe they not send you a motorola box that acts as a DSL/cable router and have a port specifically for your phone. this allows voip traffic to take priority over other data traffic.
The one real gotcha is that if your internet connection get flakey, the sound quality can suffer. If the connection goes away, so does your phone service.
If you do not go with vonage, get the linksys router that has QOS. This way you can point at a specific port for the phone so VOIP traffic get priority. this QOS is one of the bigger issues.
Other wise being on the phone while a big upload or download is happening and you'll think your on a bad cell connection.
How about a prison. I wrote software for a pseudo gov't agency called Federal Prison Industries.
I spent the day for 3 weeks int eh summer of 1987 in a level 5 federal prison. Level 6 in for the Hannibal Lector's of the world. Get the picture.
The inmates I was training to run this software were a murderer(not his first), a armed bank (Not his first) robber, and a Maimi Drug lord.
I got to walk in each day and be surrounded by violent felons. No escort, no kevlar.
This was the only time in my life I was glad to were a pressed shirt and tie. I help me stand out from the inmates. I had to buy new pants when I got there. The standard uniform was tan slacks. So I did not want to wear any.
One day I left after most of the staff. After the guards let me through the exit, a voice booms from the sky. Stop where you are. It's amazing that the red dot did not make me shit my pants. Then the voice said, "Show me your ID badge." I did. Then, "You may go." And the little red laser dot went away.
A little cold and noise. WIMP! Be around people would would volently assault you because you looked them in the eye at the wrong moment!
I had dinner with someone who is a salesman in Intuit. They absolutely will not pull crap like that again.
They know they lost a lot of business to Tax Cut and will be working to get those customers back this year.
No Worries.
Make sure they understand that this is special. You don't want them to think is is now a regular benefit.
In terms of amount, if the $1500 is more than a weeks pay, make it a weeks pay for each person.
As a grand gesture give each person a thank you with a $100 in cash and say the rest will show in the paycheck.
Then again your accountant can advise you on the largest "gift" you can give each person without having to apply income taxes. A $200-$500 non-taxed gift certificate for amazon will also go over very well.
As an employee my self I say give'm the $1500. As a businessman I say give them something they'll appreciate and bank the rest. With this economy, don't spend what you don't have to.
I have never seen anyone get any money worth worrying about.
At SGI. a buddy got a really nice leather jacket.
I've also seen stock grants, stock options.
Some time off.
It helps you get the next big project you want if you can predict the possibility of more IP.
Remember, half the time, the IP is used to either prevent competition, or used as a trading card.
By trading card I mean one company is given the right to use your patent in exchange for the use of one of theirs.
The best advise is to develop your ideas on your own. i.er your own computer, your own software, your own time. Don't even use the companies email for correspond with your co-inventors, confidants. Also, make sure the patent cannot be derived from work you are doing at work.
Then start your own company around the patent if possible. Then you get to hopefully make money on your idea.
Intellectual property is the big companies way of preventing competition.
They are scared. Some jobs are moving to China and former Soviet union. Even better inefficiencies. Catigorically the absolute worse programmers I have ever worked with are former russian nuclear physicists.
I know a director at intel that was told he gets to keep his job if he fires 500 american engineers and sends the jobs all offshore. He has to replace his 500 inefficient american workers with 1500-2000 indian and chinese programmers. All this to save what Intel hopes is 20%.
Isn't that special 500 US engineers on unemployment to save 20%.
I've been using the paid Yahoo mail service.
I have my ISP forward all my mail to my yahoo account.
Their spam filters are great. Spam goes into the bulk folder and the rest goes into the inbox.
I've been using this for a year and it's great. I can read different attechments without downloading them. What I download is scaned for viruses with norton.
Important, do not accept anything without understanding your rights to the source and the derivitives they create from it! You might be openoffice.org (example), but Sun is packaging it at $70 per copy.
Make sure it is spell out what they are doing with it.
Make sure they don't gain the right to take you off the project if you don't meet their deadlines for releases.
Make sure that if they see Intellectual Property(IP), i.e. patent potential, that you do not sign your right away. If they are funding you, you could loose your rights to IP they pay to patent.
Make sure you have the right to "hire and fire" and personel they give you.
Talk to a CPA, yours not theirs. You want to make sure you are set up correctly for tax purposes. If this is open source of for profit, you are a business, if you are doing this for the good of mankind and envison your self as a non-profit, there are tax issues on either side of this.
If you are a business, they can loan you a machine. If you are a non-profit, they can donate the machine to the non-profit.
If people are earning more take two actions:
1. Update your resume and get it out there.
2.Approach your boss and HR about a salary adjustment. Not a raise, a salary adjustment.
A Salary adjustment is justified by bringing your compensation in line with new hires with the same title and grade.
A Raise is based on merit and a review.
Then again, is $200/month after taxes worth raising a stink? I tend to not worry until the discrepancy is closer to 10%.
Either way, first get the resume out there for a week or two. You will need to see what is happening incase the alternative given by the company is that you will have to wait for your review.
Just remember, a salary is better than unemployment.
There is no law to protect you, only company policy. Unless you really want the definition of "at will employment."
Even if your business is about the bottom line, involve the right managers.
The QA department sees time lost and money spent on engineers to support bugs reported.
The Engineering VP sees additional head count to maintain or rewrite the code at some point in the future.
The VP of Sales see his staff fighting bad press. i.e. lost sales.
Make sure these same managers know what marketing is doing. In a well run company, there are a few, the marketing guys will be stopped in their tracks from pulling this type of shit.
If you work for the average short sighted company, your screwed. I usually get the hell out as soon as I can. Although these days with the lousy job market, it might mean you have to smile and deal with a lot of shit for 6 months.
Most of the "admin" work I do is answering user questions.
For admin tasks such as rearranging the repsoitory, that is by hand.
Creating a new repository, a command. A small script.
Managing labels is done through client software (smartcvs, winCVS, tortise or interface in java IDEs) or the commands line.
Most of what I would like a tools for is branching and merging. Multiple merges from a development branch into an integration branch is time consuming. Even with diff tools such as Araxis or Guiffy. Most of this is because turning off keyword expansion temorarily is not convienent. Most of the differences in this type of merge is just the keyword expansion text.
The cooler integrations and work will be through scripts you add into loginfo, commitinfo and verifymsg.
In the end I find I do very little real backend work after the initial setup of new repsoitories.
What specific tasks are you looking for a tool to do?
Slashdot Mirror
Setup somewhere with more pleasant weather than the south and you'll get people willing to leave the SF Bay area.
Look into the Seattle Area.
We just want:
I live in the SF Bay area because of the variety of work I get to do. I'm willing to leave and even earn less if I can buy a house and not live paycheck to paycheck.
Just completed paying for something I've been trying to pay all day.
Not the best, but it works across all platforms.
It is best to just sign up for a yahoo or hotmail account that you don't use.
As I find it hard to get good information from a google search without a lot of work, I do prefer books.
The problem is that you can't own all the books and can't just drive to a computer book store at any moment.
Being able to search and have it go through all the books a service has instead of all the useless newgroups is well worth the money.
Knowing that for $270 per seat having access to search all those books is great. Our initial test of 5 engineers for the last year worked out well.
When you did not get a response, you had 30 days from purchase for full protection and 60 days for partial protection to have the CC company challenge the charge.
They would have given you the refund and backcharge the reseller.
I'll start and say that the article is well written. But if your developers are not able to access kde, this wom't help much. I am running a site with 8 repositories each with mulitple modules and different levels of users on different windows and unix's/linux. The best client I found was smartCVS. The latest beta has great diff, mergs and conflict tool built in. Beats tha pant's off WinCVS and tortoise. It also presents operations so that non-technical users can easily learn the basics.
four of my friends have it and it works great. they now have 911 service in most areas. This is important to check on. Some services do not let you connect to 911 or 411.
If you get a business accounts, you even get a fax line as part of the service.
You can transfer your current pstn phone number.
Voice quality is at least a good as PSTN. See QOS notes below.
They used to send cisco-186 adapters for analog phone. I believe they not send you a motorola box that acts as a DSL/cable router and have a port specifically for your phone. this allows voip traffic to take priority over other data traffic.
The one real gotcha is that if your internet connection get flakey, the sound quality can suffer. If the connection goes away, so does your phone service.
If you do not go with vonage, get the linksys router that has QOS. This way you can point at a specific port for the phone so VOIP traffic get priority. this QOS is one of the bigger issues.
Other wise being on the phone while a big upload or download is happening and you'll think your on a bad cell connection.
I spent the day for 3 weeks int eh summer of 1987 in a level 5 federal prison. Level 6 in for the Hannibal Lector's of the world. Get the picture.
The inmates I was training to run this software were a murderer(not his first), a armed bank (Not his first) robber, and a Maimi Drug lord.
I got to walk in each day and be surrounded by violent felons. No escort, no kevlar.
This was the only time in my life I was glad to were a pressed shirt and tie. I help me stand out from the inmates. I had to buy new pants when I got there. The standard uniform was tan slacks. So I did not want to wear any.
One day I left after most of the staff. After the guards let me through the exit, a voice booms from the sky. Stop where you are. It's amazing that the red dot did not make me shit my pants. Then the voice said, "Show me your ID badge." I did. Then, "You may go." And the little red laser dot went away.
A little cold and noise. WIMP! Be around people would would volently assault you because you looked them in the eye at the wrong moment!
I had dinner with someone who is a salesman in Intuit. They absolutely will not pull crap like that again. They know they lost a lot of business to Tax Cut and will be working to get those customers back this year. No Worries.
Otherwise it seems fine. But if your users use custom views, you will be an unhappy system adminstrator.
Without the tunnel, I find the calendar and task list managment to be unusable.
Try looking into citrix instead. Get one really beefy box and make it a citrix server.
Unfortunately, I find OWA and Mozilla to be awkward.
But I.E 6.0 and OWA for exchange 2000 is quite usable.
Make sure they understand that this is special. You don't want them to think is is now a regular benefit. In terms of amount, if the $1500 is more than a weeks pay, make it a weeks pay for each person. As a grand gesture give each person a thank you with a $100 in cash and say the rest will show in the paycheck. Then again your accountant can advise you on the largest "gift" you can give each person without having to apply income taxes. A $200-$500 non-taxed gift certificate for amazon will also go over very well. As an employee my self I say give'm the $1500. As a businessman I say give them something they'll appreciate and bank the rest. With this economy, don't spend what you don't have to.
I have never seen anyone get any money worth worrying about. At SGI. a buddy got a really nice leather jacket. I've also seen stock grants, stock options. Some time off. It helps you get the next big project you want if you can predict the possibility of more IP. Remember, half the time, the IP is used to either prevent competition, or used as a trading card. By trading card I mean one company is given the right to use your patent in exchange for the use of one of theirs. The best advise is to develop your ideas on your own. i.er your own computer, your own software, your own time. Don't even use the companies email for correspond with your co-inventors, confidants. Also, make sure the patent cannot be derived from work you are doing at work. Then start your own company around the patent if possible. Then you get to hopefully make money on your idea. Intellectual property is the big companies way of preventing competition.
They seem resonable so far. http://www.extanthost.com/
They are scared. Some jobs are moving to China and former Soviet union. Even better inefficiencies. Catigorically the absolute worse programmers I have ever worked with are former russian nuclear physicists.
dickwad? Your about 17, right? That was the last time I heard someone outside some teen flick say that.
Isn't that special 500 US engineers on unemployment to save 20%.
The problem is that we can't. As a US Citizen you can't get a work visa. Same for China. They do have protectionism. Turn around is fair play.
We can't compete. That is the problem. They get $550/month in india.
I've been using the paid Yahoo mail service. I have my ISP forward all my mail to my yahoo account. Their spam filters are great. Spam goes into the bulk folder and the rest goes into the inbox. I've been using this for a year and it's great. I can read different attechments without downloading them. What I download is scaned for viruses with norton.
Make it hourly. Rates, $30-$40.
Important, do not accept anything without understanding your rights to the source and the derivitives they create from it! You might be openoffice.org (example), but Sun is packaging it at $70 per copy.
Make sure it is spell out what they are doing with it.
Make sure they don't gain the right to take you off the project if you don't meet their deadlines for releases.
Make sure that if they see Intellectual Property(IP), i.e. patent potential, that you do not sign your right away. If they are funding you, you could loose your rights to IP they pay to patent.
Make sure you have the right to "hire and fire" and personel they give you.
Talk to a CPA, yours not theirs. You want to make sure you are set up correctly for tax purposes. If this is open source of for profit, you are a business, if you are doing this for the good of mankind and envison your self as a non-profit, there are tax issues on either side of this.
If you are a business, they can loan you a machine. If you are a non-profit, they can donate the machine to the non-profit.
You need to think about what you want in the end.
Nothing wrong with getting your resume out there. I've never been "asked to Leave." because my resume was sent out.
Try to live on $200/week. Especially when at the end of the year you have to pay taxes on it.
1. Update your resume and get it out there.
2.Approach your boss and HR about a salary adjustment. Not a raise, a salary adjustment.
A Salary adjustment is justified by bringing your compensation in line with new hires with the same title and grade.
A Raise is based on merit and a review.
Then again, is $200/month after taxes worth raising a stink? I tend to not worry until the discrepancy is closer to 10%.
Either way, first get the resume out there for a week or two. You will need to see what is happening incase the alternative given by the company is that you will have to wait for your review.
Just remember, a salary is better than unemployment.
There is no law to protect you, only company policy. Unless you really want the definition of "at will employment."
Or to learn how a 1 person layoff comes about.
The QA department sees time lost and money spent on engineers to support bugs reported.
The Engineering VP sees additional head count to maintain or rewrite the code at some point in the future.
The VP of Sales see his staff fighting bad press. i.e. lost sales.
Make sure these same managers know what marketing is doing. In a well run company, there are a few, the marketing guys will be stopped in their tracks from pulling this type of shit.
If you work for the average short sighted company, your screwed. I usually get the hell out as soon as I can. Although these days with the lousy job market, it might mean you have to smile and deal with a lot of shit for 6 months.
Good Luck.
For admin tasks such as rearranging the repsoitory, that is by hand.
Creating a new repository, a command. A small script.
Managing labels is done through client software (smartcvs, winCVS, tortise or interface in java IDEs) or the commands line.
Most of what I would like a tools for is branching and merging. Multiple merges from a development branch into an integration branch is time consuming. Even with diff tools such as Araxis or Guiffy. Most of this is because turning off keyword expansion temorarily is not convienent. Most of the differences in this type of merge is just the keyword expansion text.
The cooler integrations and work will be through scripts you add into loginfo, commitinfo and verifymsg.
In the end I find I do very little real backend work after the initial setup of new repsoitories.
What specific tasks are you looking for a tool to do?