Job thread

[Yegolev]

I've been married long enough that I've buffer-overflowed over to giving zero fucks.  I just don't even answer the "Why don't you have an umbrella?" because it's been 18 years and adults can learn lessons.

Women, indeed.

[Merusk]

 

[Paelos]

No weather site seems to be able to handle Georgia's pop-up showers lately. It's like the Spanish Inquisition.

[Yegolev]

If you figure out how to predict those, I would love to introduce you to a few people.

[HaemishM]

Mississippi has those every goddamn day for the last month or so. I can predict them. They will happen when I least want them to.

[Druzil]

Godspeed.

Today I Learned: Closure in functional programming.  I had to read two different explanations but I feel like I have it.  This is the sort of thing that causes me to wish I'd taken CS courses at some point in the past.

I don't really follow this thread but I saw discussion on lambda calculus so I'm just kinda jumping in here.  If you're interested in learning or staying current I can't recommend pluralsight.com enough.  They have a huge amount of experts and tutorials on a range of IT topics and skill levels.  If you want to learn just the basics or if you want to learn application architecture, they have it.  I've had a subscription for a couple years now and it's been worth every penny.   I don't know if you have any user groups in the area but I know at mine sometimes they give away 30 day free trial codes.   Many of the authors are also the evangelists/experts that your hear speak at all of the IT conventions around.   I also find learning though videos easier to stick with that trudging through tech books all the time.

I used to use weather underground back before I had a smartphone but now I have the AccuWeather app (probably because it was first on the list).  Should I be using something else?  It used to be an OK app but then they changed the whole thing to fancy it up and now it's pretty awful to navigate.

[Sky]

No weather site seems to be able to handle Georgia's pop-up showers lately. It's like the Spanish Inquisition.

In Upstate NY you have to lean heavy on the radar and knowledge of the land features. I can fairly regularly look at a front moving through and tell if it's going to swing north or south of us.

In the winter it's the lake effect snow (coming off the Great Lakes). We get a nice band that can move north and south and dump foots of snows. But the Tughill always gets slammed, it's the fulcrum of that movement (and where I lived in 2000-1 without 4WD which is why I have an FJ and a big snowblower now).

[Yegolev]

I don't know which phone app is better in terms of user experience.  I just know that the weather data we produce is best.  But once we my computers dump out a JSON* as long as your arm, I'm no longer involved.

* For regular people.

[Yegolev]

I was going to mention, regarding PluralSight, that I am getting free Safari/O'Reilly access.  I just found that I now also get free PluralSight, so I guess I'll compare.

[Chimpy]

I was going to mention, regarding PluralSight, that I am getting free Safari/O'Reilly access.  I just found that I now also get free PluralSight, so I guess I'll compare.

Pluralsight is full-on on demand video courses. I liked Safari for the access to the books, but the places where I had Safari access I also had Lynda or something else with instructor led training videos too.

I think MS is still giving away free 3 month (was 6 when I signed up) memberships to Pluralsight if you join their free VisualStudio Essentials program.

[Yegolev]

O'Reilly is working on the video thing, but I haven't had the drive to look at any of them.  For better or worse, I'm basically learning by doing.

[Samprimary]

egh, my money and job situation keeps getting worse. i keep trying to learn how to network better, but rent's coming up. i shouldn't complain too much about being physically better, but i sure wish i'd gotten better just a month earlier!

next stop: emergency last minute jobs. dishwashing, perhaps.

[Yegolev]

Video Game QA Lead

[HaemishM]

Video Game QA Lead

He'd be better off as a homeless ball washer.

[Yegolev]

I think the ball washing would take more effort.

[Samprimary]

I think the ball washing would take more effort.

:<

[Jimbo]

I got into it with a staff RN and the Chief Nursing Officer of my Hospital. I turned in my two weeks notice yesterday, boils down to they want to promote a dangerous work environment that can cause harm to the patients. That day I got 5 travel RN job offers, and a job offer at another hospital and another recruiter call me.

I'm also proud that I didn't call her (the CNO) dumber than a hat full of shit and say fuck this place I quit and walk out. The sad thing is this is my home town and I really enjoyed taking care of people I know from my community.

[Trippy]

What's a travel RN job?

[Ard]

Sorta like a contract programmer, you float between hospitals that need staff temporarily.

[Cyrrex]

So now we get Jimbo Diaries: World Tour Edition?

This sounds like a great development.  For us, I mean.

[Khaldun]

Well, here's what's waiting out there for lots of people.

https://medium.com/startup-grind/i-got-scammed-by-a-silicon-valley-startup-574ced8acdff#.jartszfwp

[Yegolev]

That's a good read for inexperienced workers.

[HaemishM]

I read that the other day. You don't have to be in Silicon Valley to have that shit happen to you. A lot of that shit happened to me here in '97 with a complete shitbag boss.

[Viin]

What a crappy situation. So many people are horrible at running a business and are terrible to their employees (usually because their egos get in the way).

[Merusk]

She painted herself as a veteran employee at one point, but I saw a whole lot of "I want to BELIEVE" in there on her part as well.

You want me to fly out short notice and on my own dime for a C-level position? You hired my direct report and she's using a management-level title? You've never had an actual meeting about where your product is positioned and what the brand is?

Those alone should have been enough to nope out on. Staying a few weeks after you didn't get paid is REALLLY not wanting to look like a naive idiot and hoping things work out.

[RhyssaFireheart]

That really was a good read.

[HaemishM]

Staying a few weeks after you didn't get paid is REALLLY not wanting to look like a naive idiot and hoping things work out.

That's the kind of thing you learn past 30 - 20-somethings probably don't know that at all because the hope hasn't been beaten out of them yet. 

I stayed in the job I mentioned above for 6 months - every paycheck, all 5 of the employees went to the bank the payroll check was written on and tried to cash it. Sometimes only 1 or 2 of the checks would cash that first day, sometimes it'd take 3 days for the money to be available. The only time in that 6-month period paychecks were on time and cashable was when ADP took over payroll. And just like in the story, we stopped getting checks from ADP because of a dispute with our boss (which was probably because one of his checks to them bounced but we were never told the real reason). I was in my 20's. I stayed until I got another comparable job, but took less overall money just to not have to deal with that bullshit again.

[Miguel]

There are two kinds of managers/leaders here in Silicon Valley:

A. Those with a vision
B. Those who know how to execute

I have run across many with one or the other, but finding both in a single company can be a rare thing.  The 'A' types go on and on about 'market penetration', 'blissful user experience', 'sweeping paradigm shifts', and 'imagine what would happen if 10% of all users utilized feature X', etc, etc... but don't have a fucking clue how to build, maintain, or scale, and kind of technology or group of people.

Or the 'B' types that know how to run a scrum, can pare down features to fit a schedule, hold effective bug scrubs, and can build up engineering teams and to facilitate rapid progress, except the product itself is total shit (although well developed, and well tested shit) that doesn't actually solve any problems that real users actually experience.

Those who don't fall into either category end up starting game studios. 

[Khaldun]

I was just dealing with an all-millennial group of consultants who had a great "product" they were pitching to higher ed a while back and it was all vision, no execution--and I would not be at all surprised to find out that the three or four people close to the center of the company are making money and everybody else is being asked to "hang in there" and all that sort of stuff.

I also think the number of on-the-make guys who claim to be grads of Harvard Business or Stanford or MIT or Wharton and just hope nobody actually asks for proof is on the rise. You get one or two people who are in on the con, a bit of seed money so you can fake having an office and some venture capital, and then you start hiring genuinely skilled people and letting them be the people who go out there to represent you and try to draw in more money. If you last long enough, you fold the tent and say, gosh too bad, and now you have an actual former start-up on the resume so that maybe you can squeeze into the board on someone else's startup or get an exec position. I strongly suspect there are more than a few phonies who've made it that far without getting caught like this guy did.

[Strazos]

Yup, does not make me regret foregoing the private sector. At all.

Sure, the gubmint has its issues...but the pay comes in like clockwork.

[Selby]

Good article, but could have been written 15-16 years ago during the first dotcom crash and burn (that Fucked Company and others documented so lovingly).  Nice to see con men still exist ;-)

[Khaldun]

Yeah. There's one running for President even.

Though he's an old-time grifter. The new breed has some new kinds of schtick up their sleeve.

[apocrypha]

So a few months ago my wife started working at a photographic studio as an account manager. She's been saying since she started that they're desperate for more freelance photographers on their books, they're regularly short of people who can shoot room sets, fashion, products.

So this month I find I'm short of work, again. The market has collapsed to nothing round here, and much as I like not working I'm also starting to run out of money. So I meet up with my wife's boss, show him my portfolio, which he seems to like, talk about my experience etc. Finally comes to the issue of money and he says the highest they pay for freelancers is £100/day, but he'd start me on £75/day. That's 40% more than minimum wage. For a skilled job, for someone with a good portfolio and several years experience and £15k worth of my own gear. I know for a fact that he charges clients £350-400/day for photography alone with studio costs, props, models, stylists, etc. all on top of that. And he wonders why they're short of photographers.

[rattran]

So he only gets freelancers who are either desperate or terribad, and tell him to fuck off as soon as they get better gigs? Sounds like my boss and sales help.

[apocrypha]

Yep, and apparently he constantly complains that the freelancers are shit....