It's practical to setup an internal CA for a *small* company, since you don't even need the CA in the first place, you just need self-signed certs, and you can explicitly accept these certs on each desktop. What can be tricky is putting your internal CA into a large enterprise, where you have the dilemma of needing access to keystores or requiring users to accept untrusted certs on the assumption that they are from your internal CA.
With a year's pay in the bank, you cross a line from being someone that your boss might want to get rid of, to being someone that your boss, or someone else, wants to figure out a way to get you to invest in their enterprise. It's also the threshold where you can be really honest when talking to your boss.
I can guarantee that unless your boss is a devotee of Dave Ramsey or something, he doesn't have a year's worth of *his* salary sitting in a money market account (this is in addition to investments, mind you.)
Yeah with just a few months of living expenses (it doesn't have to be a whole year, nor does it have to be your whole *salary*, just your expenses), you have a very liberating ability to be very honest with people. It's pretty cool -- I've been there once, and am trying to get there again.
If the offer of "a shorter commute" is something along the lines of "I'm going to live in downtown Boulder and my commute will be to Pearl St." then yes, that's worth a lot to me. Of course, that short commute can't come with a pay cut. I need 150K minimum to do that. The last place I interviewed with in Boulder didn't see it that way (but I would still happily do this, if you're reading!)
You can itemize a fairly generous deduction for your home office, as a W-2 employee with a home office requirement. Make sure you get your agreement regarding telecommuting as something that you are required to do, not simply allowed to do. Convert the largest space in your home to an office, and you can count this as an additional deduction on top of your mortgage tax.
There are people who can have this kind of conversation with their boss, literally in the frank and direct language you have used in your post, and walk out still having a job. Professionals in your category are not generally the ones facing the dilemma addressed by the Ask Slashdot question. I know that my compensation is directly related to the value generated by my work. This is atypical in some professions, especially in professions such as IT where the entire department is usually nothing but a cost center, with negative ROI.
My own work efforts don't directly generate any revenue, but they do effect measurable cost savings and less directly measurable risk mitigation for my company, and my compensation is based on that. I can do some of my work without a need even for an internet connection, and I certainly could and sometimes do telecommute. It would be pretty strange, in my environment, for anyone to express any interest in my location, unless I was missing from a meeting or something where I was expected to be.
I'm sure this experience differs greatly from someone in a large staff, or at closer to entry-level positions, or in positions where one's individual contribution is not easily measured (or if measured, is not particularly highly valued.)
This. (I love what I know about Rackspace, by the way, and I hope it is a great place to work.).
The proposition to telecommute should be framed as a benefit to the company, in terms of them being able to retain you, as opposed to them losing you because you aren't moving to their location or whatever. Yeah, obviously you need to be in this kind of bargaining position. But it should involve a negotiation in terms of opportunity cost on the employee's part, and certainly not "taking a pay cut."
I took a telecommuting job because it represented an increase. The "working from home" thing wasn't the principal aspect of the negotiation, the value of my labor, the institutional knowledge that I carried, and my track record were everything, and the whole telecommuting aspect was, for them, part of the risk that they might not be able to retain me.
Always negotiate from a point of view of strength. I can hardly think of a situation where I would stay with a company that was literally offering a pay cut. I would gamble that I could get a change of scenery, at worst, by taking that pay cut elsewhere, if it came down to it. I'm sure I'd open by looking for an increase elsewhere.
The moment you start to entertain the notion of a pay cut, you've basically started losing the game anyway. On this subject, the whole "telecommute" or even the location issue is secondary. In a company of any size, the people who think in terms of your salary are probably completely different from the people who think in terms of where you are located at any given moment.
I would receive the proposition of "pay cut for telecommuting" as a trial baloon where the end result is termination, and would respond *exactly* as if I had been "offered" a pay cut with *nothing* in return. On the other hand, I think I have a pretty good concept of my value to the business I work for, and I know they don't actually care if I'm at my desk, at home, or at a coffee shop, as long as I'm in the f2f meetings (where I'm usually the party responsible for the meeting anyway), I'm resolutely "mid-career" and I admittedly have a lot of the attitude of a tenured professor (which I'm not), so my attitude might not serve me well in a more adversarial employment scenario.
The last time I had a 100% telecommute job, it included a significant pay *raise*. The company wanted to retain me, but I wanted to leave. I did not have any interest at all in moving with the company and they knew it. Not only did I get a pay raise (from the high 80s to the low 120s, this was in 2003), I also got my home office very nicely furnished. This was a salaried position with benefits, and it lasted for more than three years.
After I finally left that job, I went into academia. I was pretty soft, not so much from the whole "home office" thing, but from the "being in demand/indispensable" thing which totally spoiled me. I'm still pretty much recovering from all that, but I chose my current job based on the work I do, not the environment or the compensation. My employer doesn't care if I do my work from home, from a coffee shop, from my cubicle, or from an empty conference room or my car in the parking lot. It's simply not an issue.
So do you think they are withholding information and doling it out slowly in order to keep up an information embargo? Or do you think they might simply be releasing information as it becomes known?
I don't think they want to fix the crack to prevent seawater pollution. I think they want to fix the crack because they need to use the pit as a container.
It's perfectly acceptable to report only the facts as they are known, instead of speculation and conjecture about what is unknown, and attacking the primary sources of information. This does not make one an "industry shill."
The impression I got was that they were much more concerned about fixing that crack in an effort to preserve the integrity of the pit, as opposed to preventing leakage to the sea. In other words, they need that pit. They are willing to let water drain to the sea if necessary, but without being able to use that pit to store water, they have some different problem.
Obviously the people who are at the site are not devoting a whole lot of resources toward making English-translated reports and high-resolution video of the scene just for what amounts to our voyeuristic desire for more information. This is understandable, even if to some people it looks like an information embargo.
>Nobody was killed? Just wait a few years and you will have many deaths.
That's a conjecture based on your assumptions. You are basing your assumptions on speculation and a biased opinion about the disaster. Your guess may turn out to be right, but just because you might have a lucky guess doesn't mean that facts should be invented.
>What I find most disturbing is the lack of information they are telling us.
Do you think they (TEPCO, or the Japanese or US governments) have any information they haven't made public? Could you be specific about what that information might be? Do you think anyone who is actually involved in the disaster effort has had any material information withheld from them?
Do you have a reference to anyone speaking for TEPCO or the Japanese government saying they had total control of the situation, ever?
I agree that it can be slow getting English-translated information from the site, and that there aren't people at the site making conjectures and reporting speculation, and the whole thing can feel like an information embargo which can be interpreted as official dissembling and outright lying.
>The sad part is if you read TFA (I know, but I got bored) then you'll see they paid for backups as part of their service agreement but the ISP lied and hadn't >actually bothered to back up shit.
When you're on the storage provider's side of this it's easy to understand why they get into the situation they are in. How do you comply with a SLA that requires daily backups? In my relatively small shop, it means we have an expensive HP Storageworks tape drive, expensive SAS cards, an expensive contract with a tape storage place, a continuous supply of expensive tapes, an expensive and labor intensive management protocol to ensure that tapes get loaded, backups get scheduled, get successfully written, can be recovered in disaster drills, and this is for an *automated* backup system, and even so we cannot manage more than getting about 8 terabytes of data saved and sent offsite in a week's time.
ISPs that offer a backup SLA tend to rely on D2D solutions, or worse, they haven't yet been bitten by failure modes of Netapp or EMC or whatever that aren't supposed to happen. (As a sysadmin, I saw simultaneous failures of *three* drives in a Netapp, *twice*, which is something that Netapp claimed never happened before.)
I would be hard pressed today to come up with the exact distribution I used for 1.09 I just noticed that it would be harder than I expected to reproduce Slackware 1.0 or so, even without Volkerdink's April Fool's joke.
Knuth's books didn't start making much sense until I took the first semester of Discrete Math. Basically I didn't have many of the problems for which those texts were the solution until then, but I certainly started to benefit from them long before I was into "advanced academic computing" (and continued to benefit during those analysis courses.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's practical to setup an internal CA for a *small* company, since you don't even need the CA in the first place, you just need self-signed certs, and you can explicitly accept these certs on each desktop. What can be tricky is putting your internal CA into a large enterprise, where you have the dilemma of needing access to keystores or requiring users to accept untrusted certs on the assumption that they are from your internal CA.
If you can provoke them all they way past threats and into assault, you can probably retire on that ;)
With a year's pay in the bank, you cross a line from being someone that your boss might want to get rid of, to being someone that your boss, or someone else, wants to figure out a way to get you to invest in their enterprise. It's also the threshold where you can be really honest when talking to your boss.
I can guarantee that unless your boss is a devotee of Dave Ramsey or something, he doesn't have a year's worth of *his* salary sitting in a money market account (this is in addition to investments, mind you.)
Yeah with just a few months of living expenses (it doesn't have to be a whole year, nor does it have to be your whole *salary*, just your expenses), you have a very liberating ability to be very honest with people. It's pretty cool -- I've been there once, and am trying to get there again.
If the offer of "a shorter commute" is something along the lines of "I'm going to live in downtown Boulder and my commute will be to Pearl St." then yes, that's worth a lot to me. Of course, that short commute can't come with a pay cut. I need 150K minimum to do that. The last place I interviewed with in Boulder didn't see it that way (but I would still happily do this, if you're reading!)
This is why coffee shops exist. While I was telecommuting, I moved between two college towns.
You can itemize a fairly generous deduction for your home office, as a W-2 employee with a home office requirement.
Make sure you get your agreement regarding telecommuting as something that you are required to do, not simply allowed to do.
Convert the largest space in your home to an office, and you can count this as an additional deduction on top of your mortgage tax.
There are people who can have this kind of conversation with their boss, literally in the frank and direct language you have used in your post, and walk out still having a job. Professionals in your category are not generally the ones facing the dilemma addressed by the Ask Slashdot question. I know that my compensation is directly related to the value generated by my work. This is atypical in some professions, especially in professions such as IT where the entire department is usually nothing but a cost center, with negative ROI.
My own work efforts don't directly generate any revenue, but they do effect measurable cost savings and less directly measurable risk mitigation for my company, and my compensation is based on that. I can do some of my work without a need even for an internet connection, and I certainly could and sometimes do telecommute. It would be pretty strange, in my environment, for anyone to express any interest in my location, unless I was missing from a meeting or something where I was expected to be.
I'm sure this experience differs greatly from someone in a large staff, or at closer to entry-level positions, or in positions where one's individual contribution is not easily measured (or if measured, is not particularly highly valued.)
This. (I love what I know about Rackspace, by the way, and I hope it is a great place to work.).
The proposition to telecommute should be framed as a benefit to the company, in terms of them being able to retain you, as opposed to them losing you because you aren't moving to their location or whatever. Yeah, obviously you need to be in this kind of bargaining position. But it should involve a negotiation in terms of opportunity cost on the employee's part, and certainly not "taking a pay cut."
I took a telecommuting job because it represented an increase. The "working from home" thing wasn't the principal aspect of the negotiation, the value of my labor, the institutional knowledge that I carried, and my track record were everything, and the whole telecommuting aspect was, for them, part of the risk that they might not be able to retain me.
Always negotiate from a point of view of strength. I can hardly think of a situation where I would stay with a company that was literally offering a pay cut. I would gamble that I could get a change of scenery, at worst, by taking that pay cut elsewhere, if it came down to it. I'm sure I'd open by looking for an increase elsewhere.
The moment you start to entertain the notion of a pay cut, you've basically started losing the game anyway. On this subject, the whole "telecommute" or even the location issue is secondary. In a company of any size, the people who think in terms of your salary are probably completely different from the people who think in terms of where you are located at any given moment.
I would receive the proposition of "pay cut for telecommuting" as a trial baloon where the end result is termination, and would respond *exactly* as if I had been "offered" a pay cut with *nothing* in return. On the other hand, I think I have a pretty good concept of my value to the business I work for, and I know they don't actually care if I'm at my desk, at home, or at a coffee shop, as long as I'm in the f2f meetings (where I'm usually the party responsible for the meeting anyway), I'm resolutely "mid-career" and I admittedly have a lot of the attitude of a tenured professor (which I'm not), so my attitude might not serve me well in a more adversarial employment scenario.
You get the ones that you can lure to your trailer park. They get the ones that will kill each other for the chance to get on the fancy yacht.
The last time I had a 100% telecommute job, it included a significant pay *raise*. The company wanted to retain me, but I wanted to leave. I did not have any interest at all in moving with the company and they knew it. Not only did I get a pay raise (from the high 80s to the low 120s, this was in 2003), I also got my home office very nicely furnished. This was a salaried position with benefits, and it lasted for more than three years.
After I finally left that job, I went into academia. I was pretty soft, not so much from the whole "home office" thing, but from the "being in demand/indispensable" thing which totally spoiled me. I'm still pretty much recovering from all that, but I chose my current job based on the work I do, not the environment or the compensation. My employer doesn't care if I do my work from home, from a coffee shop, from my cubicle, or from an empty conference room or my car in the parking lot. It's simply not an issue.
So do you think they are withholding information and doling it out slowly in order to keep up an information embargo? Or do you think they might simply be releasing information as it becomes known?
I don't think they want to fix the crack to prevent seawater pollution. I think they want to fix the crack because they need to use the pit as a container.
Is Sv a linear or a log scale?
It's perfectly acceptable to report only the facts as they are known, instead of speculation and conjecture about what is unknown, and attacking the primary sources of information. This does not make one an "industry shill."
The impression I got was that they were much more concerned about fixing that crack in an effort to preserve the integrity of the pit, as opposed to preventing leakage to the sea. In other words, they need that pit. They are willing to let water drain to the sea if necessary, but without being able to use that pit to store water, they have some different problem.
Obviously the people who are at the site are not devoting a whole lot of resources toward making English-translated reports and high-resolution video of the scene just for what amounts to our voyeuristic desire for more information. This is understandable, even if to some people it looks like an information embargo.
>Nobody was killed? Just wait a few years and you will have many deaths.
That's a conjecture based on your assumptions.
You are basing your assumptions on speculation and a biased opinion about the disaster. Your guess may turn out to be right, but just because you might have a lucky guess doesn't mean that facts should be invented.
>What I find most disturbing is the lack of information they are telling us.
Do you think they (TEPCO, or the Japanese or US governments) have any information they haven't made public? Could you be specific about what that information might be? Do you think anyone who is actually involved in the disaster effort has had any material information withheld from them?
Do you have a reference to anyone speaking for TEPCO or the Japanese government saying they had total control of the situation, ever?
I agree that it can be slow getting English-translated information from the site, and that there aren't people at the site making conjectures and reporting speculation, and the whole thing can feel like an information embargo which can be interpreted as official dissembling and outright lying.
>Why people give information to retailers is beyond me.
They don't care. They really, really don't care. It doesn't occur to them that there is any problem.
What do they require for ID? How do they authenticate this ID? I wonder if there is a discrimination card to play here.
>The sad part is if you read TFA (I know, but I got bored) then you'll see they paid for backups as part of their service agreement but the ISP lied and hadn't
>actually bothered to back up shit.
When you're on the storage provider's side of this it's easy to understand why they get into the situation they are in. How do you comply with a SLA that requires daily backups? In my relatively small shop, it means we have an expensive HP Storageworks tape drive, expensive SAS cards, an expensive contract with a tape storage place, a continuous supply of expensive tapes, an expensive and labor intensive management protocol to ensure that tapes get loaded, backups get scheduled, get successfully written, can be recovered in disaster drills, and this is for an *automated* backup system, and even so we cannot manage more than getting about 8 terabytes of data saved and sent offsite in a week's time.
ISPs that offer a backup SLA tend to rely on D2D solutions, or worse, they haven't yet been bitten by failure modes of Netapp or EMC or whatever that aren't supposed to happen. (As a sysadmin, I saw simultaneous failures of *three* drives in a Netapp, *twice*, which is something that Netapp claimed never happened before.)
I would be hard pressed today to come up with the exact distribution I used for 1.09
I just noticed that it would be harder than I expected to reproduce Slackware 1.0 or so, even without Volkerdink's April Fool's joke.
It would not be an "event", it would be an asymptotic limit of inflationary pressure on the currency.
All US debt is denominated in US currency.
It's not "chapter foo bankruptcy" that economists fear, it is "hyperinflation".
Go further: They want something that shows them the pictures they want, deduced from *how* they picked it up.
Knuth's books didn't start making much sense until I took the first semester of Discrete Math. Basically I didn't have many of the problems for which those texts were the solution until then, but I certainly started to benefit from them long before I was into "advanced academic computing" (and continued to benefit during those analysis courses.)