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Coder on the Cross
Posted by
michael
on Wed May 02, 2001 12:20 AM
from the greed-kills dept.
from the greed-kills dept.
Salon has a nice story of start-up greed and stupidity. It's not the first, and it's not the last, but it's good reading, in a schadenfreude sense. :)
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Coder on the Cross
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This should probably apply to Salon (Score:4)
This isn't always the way the world ends.... (Score:5)
It's a total crapshoot.
Once I got to go to a faraway land, work on strange and interesting projects and kill deadlines, helping to score a $15M contract right out from under the nose of a competitor. I was one of 5 Golden Boys and we did nothing but eat sleep and drink code for almost 3 months straight. I got paid well and got a vacation out of it at their expense in the end.
Most recently, I went back in the barrel for two months, coded my ass off, gave the demo of my life and practically brought tears to the eyes of the CEO. She still canned the lot of us 2 minutes later, citing problems with their "burn rate".
What did I learn?
It's a total ride and a total crapshoot. When you win, you win big, when you don't you tend to create new and interesting geographical features known as "impact craters".
Also, just my personal experience, you tend to win more often when the project's scope is more than just "owning the space" or "conquering the market segment" and not just in a karmic,spiritual sense either.
Why sign up for a 3-5 year gig when your owners(and I do mean owners) have a 3-month (1 Quarter) attention span?
Re:The Eventual Downfall of Every Man (Score:5)
I don't buy this at all. A lion is not evil when it kills an antelope; that just the way it is. The lion is simply living according to its nature, which might be bad news for the antelopes, but moral good and evil don't even come into the picture.
In fact, the lion is living exactly as it is supposed to. If anything, that is the definition of good, from its own perspective (apologies for the anthropomorphication, but good/evil is a human concept).
Now you say that for man to live according to his nature - i.e. self-interest as motivator - is evil. But I ask you, how can it be evil? If this is how we are, how do we gain by denying it? You don't see lions trying to grow crops, do you? And you don't see lions forging weapons to fight hunters on their own term either.
I will leave you with some Nietzsche:
"Think again before postulating the drive to self preservation as the cardinal drive in an organic being. A living thing desires above all to vent its strength - life as such is will to power - self preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of it".
Re:His first mistake. (Score:3)
It works like this.
You want in. They're hip. They're cool. You want it.
They seem distant but vaguely knowable. They challenge your intellect to *think like them*.
You do so, successfully, probably damaging your neural pathways in the effort.
You are congratulated. Now you're in! WHEE!
You are now expected to 'hive think' like M$ does.
M$ has a campus. They make it feel like college, where everybody has Status, to be taken or surrendered.
M$ is a battlezone, much like college.
Bill is the guy in the mask asking you to bend over for a whack to enter a fraternity.
It's his revenge.
It's also pathetic.
Re:Money, ideology, conviction, ego ... (Score:5)
Good question. It's not the industry, as such, that's eating people, far as I can tell - it's this sort of universal "corporate disease" that hits technology companies, or at least the tech divisions of companies, hardest. But why THIS sector of the economy? Why THESE companies?
Maybe it's the "gold rush" mentality. I mean, people don't get burned out doing architecture, or doing graphic design (usually), maybe that's because in those industries, you have to BE one before you get put in a position to manage. In high-churn sectors, like the dotcom craze at its peak, you get a lot of nontechies owning companies and putting other nontechies in positions of power. Managers who don't understand what's really involved with a ship date, or who don't understand the mental stresses of keeping huge blobs of code straight in one's head for days on end. Leadership who thinks "if I don't understand it, it must be simple." And for that matter, leadership with dollar sign eyeballs, who simply don't care about anything except profit and don't even notice the burned-out empty husks of programmers sitting around the computer room. On the other side, programming isn't like manual labor, where your body wears out before your brain; most people don't understand mental stress and what it does, and thus will continue to put in 70 and 80 hour weeks, not making the connection between that and the routine fainting spells.
Or maybe, this crap happens in EVERY industry, we just don't hear about it.
Work ain't what it used to be (Score:5)
The idea of working illness-provoking hours to demonstrate your loyalty to the company is slowly becoming passe as small, high tech firms are dying.
All of the people who decided to sacrifice their social lives, their families and their health for some nebulous pot of gold at the end of the dot-com rainbow are now realizing what people like my dad (at age 70) learned a few decades back: There's more to life than making a bucket load of cash.
While money is a great tool that lets you do the things that you want to do, work can also be a horrible way to keep you from enjoying the parts of life that make existence worthwhile.
It seems to me that the moral of the story is that working a brutal schedule and producing a lot of product isn't always the winning combination for a successful life. I guess my dad wasn't such a dummy after all.
BTW, I've figured out my own secret of success. I'm an engineer at a big electronics company. I work 40 hours a week. And that's it. And I go home, forget about work, mow my lawn, go for a walk, watch the sunset and enjoy my life. And still make enough money to do everything that I want to do.
-h-
Re:So what? (Score:3)
Why? You were just given $100 a share of profit, as far as I can tell. If you are too short-sighted/greedy to capture some of that profit to offset your tax liability, then you're risking the value will go down and you're left holding the bag.
Should we protect people who short stocks from the possibility it will go up in value? Should we stop margin calls because some people don't keep enough in their accounts to cover the margin and have a forced sale of their stock to cover the margin?
This is playing the market, and if you don't want to play, then don't play. No one was complaining about the rules when they were exercising the options and getting hundreds of millions of dollars for free. Sometimes the market goes down -- should we all pay more taxes to cover these people who are too greedy to accomidate this fact?
---------------------------------------------
Re:Moral of the story... (Score:5)
But can your job love you back?
That may, in the end, be the moral that we all need to learn...
---------------------------------------------
shit happens get over it (Score:5)
working too hard means one thing: you let yourself get worked to death.
it means precisely "dick" to the planet.
get up and dust yourself off and maybe don't make the same mistake next time
Money, ideology, conviction, ego ... (Score:5)
One thing you have to admire about Bill Gates is his ability to motivate a bunch of geeks. Yes, it is possible to produce a bunker mentality (cough*North Korea*cough) and studies have shown that you can accomplish superhuman feats. However, our psychology is not designed to be running in war-zone 24 hours a day. There are reasons why troops are rotated out. The problem is that complex software often requires really convoluted linkages and the optimal unit for holding it is one brain. However smart you are, you have a finit working memory unless you encode stuff at higher abstractions (one of the tricks mathsmatics train you). This leads to dimishing returns in that to progress software (shorter release cycles) more work can only be accomplished by concentrating the thinking into a smaller group of people which naturally leads to burn-out. So managers have to continually come up with tricks or one-upmanship to motivatae the microserfs to stay committed
So given the horror stories and even web-sites describing the non-living (former employeees of Intetel, Amazon, Microserf, etc), why do people continue to act this way? Why become an economic slave for an absentee landlord (Wall Street sentiment)? How many talents will leave the industry because their bodies can't handle the stress? What is so difficult about the software industry that it eats up people like this?
LL
Ah, the high-school job... (Score:4)
Somewhere around this time I found out that the two co-founders of the company had met in prison (one for Medicare fraud, the other for drug smuggling), and had some feud going on between them. One worked in an office in the city (they did hardware development), and the other (where I worked) ran the software end in an office upstate. Well, one day when my boss was out of town at a convention, a big moving van showed up and some guys came, told us we were all fired, and started taking all the computers.
About a month later I heard from my ex-boss that he had heard that no one could compile any of my code, so they had had to hire a bunch of new programmers to rewrite everything from scratch. I then told him about my custom libraries. He gave me a big pat on the back and took me out for drinks.
I think he's back in prison now.
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket. (Score:4)
How to handle Managers
to whom the Latest Crisis is the one with Top Priority
Most common result of the above strategy:
Boss looks at your task list for a couple of minutes, then goes, "Ummm. . . ahh, ohhhh nevermind," then departs looking for someone less busy.
Re:sorry to say this (Score:3)
You're right that the programmer should have brought up the issue of conflicting commitments *when the "drop everything" order was given* instead of later, but other than that I think you're totally off-base. Saying "drop everything" without meaning it is a major error *by the manager*. Blaming the programmer for it, dismissing the identification of the manager's own role in the misunderstanding as a "smart ass remark", jumping to conclusions about the programmer's motives, slamming the door on a dialog that could clear things up productively - those are all just plain unreasonable. You sound like a manager yourself, the sort who accepts no personal accountability for what happens within their group because hey, it's the programmers doing tha actual hands-on work so it's their responsibility, right? BS.
When an unclear order is given, both parties have a responsibility to seek a clearer understanding. But this wasn't an unclear order. It was *crystal* clear - just wrong. The manager conveyed a clear meaning that was not what he actually intended. Weaseling around with "'drop everything' can mean different things" is like "depends on what the definition of 'is' is".
Totally agree about college life (Score:3)
Right now I'm in the middle of school hell. I'm working on a time-consuming internship with a project team, where the company fucked us over and delayed our project three weeks in the past 5 weeks... and now me and one other girl on our project team are the only ones who can code at all and the weight of creating all the software for the project is on both of us. In the meantime, for the SAME PROJECT, I have to complete our benchmarking report, which means taking one of the top ten insurance companies in the nation and looking at a year's worth of claims data to find anomalies in trends. We have less than two weeks to do this. That's just one class. I only have one CIS class, but it's a pain in the ass... the professor is disorganized and swamps us with logic work and projects late in the semester due to his ineptitude to stay on schedule with anything. Now I have too much on my plate the next two weeks. Furthermore, my remaining courses are burying me with work, I have no job when I graduate in 24 days, I have to spend extra time at my part time job to make current ends meet (which means usually 5pm-3am shifts), I have to take a large "advance" from my parents just to pay rent for my first month of living out of college (there's no signing bonus and no job to pay for it), I have no money in the bank worth speaking of, I've been sick for a week, and I'm developing an asthmatic condition from my ridiculous allergies due to the shitty quality of the air around here.
I have taken that ambulance ride before. Granted, that ambulance ride got me free passes to delay major projects for a few weeks, and I wound up getting on Dean's List as a result. That's the only semester I made Dean's List. Some of the rest of them are absolutely shameful. My GPA is shit, at least from where I want it to be. I'm just not a great consistent student, and I was unfortunate enough to get stuck in a major (CIS) where everyone works against you and your personal well being.
I'm not enjoying my final weeks here, to say the least. But, the satisfaction of being done, once and for all, after 4 torturous years, is the payoff I've been waiting for ever since freshman year, when I was as shitty a student as one person can ever be. I've improved drastically now, and I'm extremely consistent. My reward, of course, is going to have to look for a manual labor or all-nite diner job just to pay rent once I graduate. However, I cherish that thought... the last thing I want to do is work for a high tech company that says "You'll work an average of 50 hours a week" at this point. My heart just isn't in it.
I'll change the world on my own terms, thank you very much...
Re:overworked employees (Score:5)
It's unfortunate that people like you who only care for their own upward progress in the present system forget the past so quickly and have no sympathy for the people who live in the world with them. After all, it's just evolution right? Get rid of the stupid, the lazy, the ugly, the outcast. What right do they have to a decent living? None, if they're in your path up the corporate ladder and a six-figure salary. The sad thing is people like you are rewarded, climbing that ladder, firmly grinding your heel on the fingers of those below you because you are firmly convinced they don't climb fast enough, though perhaps they just chose to enjoy the scenery, actually have a social life, a significant other, or a family.
And, by the way, for every person that has been "rewarded for being excellent in their jobs", there is another one who has been taken advantage of just like the one in the article. Yes, he could have voted with his feet, but they had tied him to his cubicle with bonds stronger than any chains: the American Dream*.
* Incidentally, the American Dream is largely a myth. History has shown that at least 90 percent of the obscenely rich have risen from the upper middle-class or upper class. The remaining 10- percent is paraded out and overdramatized in hollywood, as a lure to keep the rest of the people working hard.
So what? (Score:4)
Well, OK. But there have been a bunch of people left a lot worse off than him, like the poor slobs with the worthless stock options who owe thousands of dollars they don't have on the Alternative Minimum Tax. I have trouble working up a lot of sympathy for someone who, by comparison, not only got off easy but did it to himself.
Amen! (Score:3)
What happened instead was that very quickly I didn't care any more about the money or the options. I worked just about every waking hour. I did it because I really liked the work and the people I was working with. Others might call it obsession but that has such a negative connotation! I was having a blast. Sure, maybe I should have taken care of my health (chronic medical condition) but I don't have time to go wait in a doctor's office....
Well, the management was as bad as the technical people were good. After 2.5 years of nearly killing myself, the company went under. Suddenly, it was all gone! My code! The system, the design! And it was really cool stuff, something that would have made a difference! And, oh yeah, no more health insurance.
Now after three months of unemployment I've been able to come back to halfway normal. Health still bad but at least I eat and get enough sleep and spend time with friends. I'm finally ready to start thinking about going back to work. Well, actually I start in a week - at another startup. Now the question is: have I learned my lesson (whatever it is) or is this going to be the job that kills me?
Re:No job... (Score:3)
You know, this may sound stupid, but to me right now it sounds like college life...
this reminds me of something i used to argue about with my classmates at University. i went to the University of Waterloo for Electrical Engineering. for those who don't know, Waterloo is widely viewed as the best engineering and CS school in Canada, and certainly not an "easy" program. i graduated from there in 2000, and while many of my classmates worked like dogs as you have described i did (comparitively) jack all nothing and pulled 1 (one) "all nighter" the whole time. and i honestly think that this is part of the point of post-secondary education.
i got through University not by doing the work, but by simply "beating the system." i made friends with people who were a year or two ahead of me (perferably "off-stream"). when it came time to do assignments, i copied like crazy, or i worked together with others. sometimes i did a half-assed job of the assignments, other times i didn't bother doing them at all (based on their marks/effort). i attended around 2% or 3% of my classes, and i foudn out what needed to be done by having casual conversations with classmates or looking up information on the school network. when it came time for exams i crammed for 2 or 3 days but i only studied that information that i deemed important judging by comments from classmates or past exams and skipped the rest of it.
the result? i have the same physical degree as all of my classmates, but put in (conservatively) 5% of the effort. sure i got averages in the 60 and low 70s (60 is the minimum to pass) but i realized quickly that the actual grade didn't mean anything, only the degree itself (especially with the work experience i gained through the co-op that was more important to potential employers than grades).
my point is, you really don't have to work all that hard. i've carried the same "get the job done" over "work hard" methodology into my real job and it's working great. i'm getting phenomenal reviews while "working" at home 3/5 days a week. the really important part is that you have to learn to prioritise what's important and what's not and get the job done. i'm a really happy person with a great social life and no stress. i'll never work 40 hour weeks again.
- j
When Unions are a good thing (Score:4)
Unions WERE a necessity back during the first half of the 1900's, but the battles were won
I agree with your sentiment, but not your literal statement.
Read Marx - he's still as accurate as ever, if you can apply the appropriate contextual changes. His model of "industrial production" described the situation where a few individually expensive machines were assembled into factories, and the work was carried out by large numbers of unskilled or semi-skilled workers. This situation hasn't gone away; it has just shrunken or moved overseas. Nike's child sweatshop workers in Vietnam need a union today as much as Victorian miners or millworkers ever did.
Even in the "high tech" world, unions still have a place. Look at call centres; they're classic instances of industrialisation on the Marxist model. How many bank or mail-order service operators can leave tomorrow and work for themselves, without the owners of the call-centre operation behind them ? Even back in the affluent west, there are still plenty of workers who need unionisation and would benefit from them.
This simplistic view of industry doesn't cover skilled geeks, and those who work in similar areas, because the capitalist owner has no means of controlling my means of production. A PC and a mobile are cheap - I can start work tomorrow as an independent consultant, and make a good living without my large corporate employer. This is my current defence against exploitation, and (in the context of similar workers) it works better than joining a Union would.
There's also a US / UK issue here. The UK has had inept, greedy and self-destructive unions (BECTA !), but we were spared the widespread corruption and graft that blighted the US union system.
The Eventual Downfall of Every Man (Score:4)
It seems to me that the most natural assumption one can have about life is that there are highs and lows. It's a cliché, I know, but that doesn't make it any less true: what goes up must come down. No-one ever thinks that far ahead, though. Everyone thinks he can milk it for more. The smart ones get out when they should get out. But we never hear about them except when the company experiences yet another meteoric rise afterwards -- then they're the stupid ones that could've been even more rich.
I fancy myself a scientist, so I don't believe in karma in any honest respect. But I think it has an uncanny way of working out. Greed never accomplishes much of anything. It's astounding to me that it's so often seen, so commonly cherished. In terms of money, past a certain point, you really don't have use for more. Why do people want to live in luxury? Comfort is enough for me. Money can get you that, but not peace of mind (the red tape of modernity is driving me insane). People that live in luxury, even, want something more. They want paradise. And those that can afford paradise? They still want more.
People often tout money. They say, happily, "You can never have enough." And use it as an excuse to seek more. That doesn't make sense to me. If you can never have enough, what value is more? Part of the problem with modern society is that we have hundreds of billions of dollars locked up in the hands of a few people that aren't putting it back into the economy. There are people starving, of course, but I need to have the closest thing to the Garden of Eden that has ever existed in my backyard.
Enough is enough. It's time we start to learn that money isn't everything, it's not the only thing, and it's not the most important thing. It's just more red-tape. I'm not against Capitalism, I don't argue against the foundations of our economy, but after a while, you begin to see that it's all just exo-structure built to obscure that we're all greedy and no-good. Hobbes was right, I guess, in that respect. We need to make society so complex we can fool ourselves into thinking we're doing something good. 99.999% of us aren't. Me included.
Sometime down the line, I'm hoping, we can see the fractal nature of our life, how it's neatly reflected in sport and art to such a high degree. It's the NBA playoffs and I've seen a lot of teams down by 3-6 points as the game is coming to an end. They have time to do things the right way, to build it up, make solid moves, and win the game. But they go for the dagger, the deathblow, the dramatic rise to heroism and victory. Their hopes rise with the desperation shot that they didn't need to take. And the fall from that emotional high is swift and hard. So often they end their hopes by placing it all in one place, everything on one shot, and when it rims out, it's game over. You can see the same in art just as well. And in other sports. Life is full of microcosms we choose to ignore. We're an amazingly reflective society, but astoudingly blind to the messages we're sending ourselves.
Maybe I won't be a millionaire in my lifetime. But I won't die trying to be one.
It's never a good start... (Score:5)
Looks like things were good from the word go!
Re:work attachment (Score:4)
A few years back, I was seventeen and working as an IT manager - yes, manager. And, I worked whenever I wasn't in school.
I worked a lot of overtime hours - but for me, the goal was ca$h - college costs money, and I wanted to go. My parents can't help me out, and despite my grades and test scores, scholorships were lacking (due to my choice of major, my sex/ethnic background, and the trend towards diversity severely limiting offerings.)
So - I worked my tail off to earn money. And you know something? It paid off in a very big way - I learned every aspect of system administration - from the corporate UNIX machines to Macs, to PC's to dummy terminals; and what's more: This has given me a serious advantage now that I am in school, and am using software packages and tools that only exist for UNIX - I can finish my projects with ease, where others are bashing their heads in just to start the program!
There is a healthy attatchment - but only when it serves your personal interest directly. The hope for 'future recognition' is a useless endeavor.
In my experience those who live for and wait for the future do little more than waste their time waiting for it to happen.
Nothing is going to happen if you aren't working to your own goals first.
No job... (Score:4)
You have to have a balance. Sure, working to get ahead, do that, it may work out, even if in this case it didnt. But you have to ask yourself - is it me I put first, or the company? Is it really worth it?
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket. (Score:4)
As an interesting side note, I work with Zeio. He's the "IT guy" mentioned below...
Several things struck me immediately in this article:
This is me, except for the "meeting deadlines" part (I'll be the first to admit that long-term concentration is not my strong point). Where I work, I'm having my "top priority" constantly jerked out from under me by my boss. Then I rush to get acquainted with the new situation, rush to get something accomplished, get 50%-90% done, and then get my "top priority" reset again.
The most frustrating experience I can recall in recent memory is when I had been working on learning our new system and porting my bug fixes to it (despite being told that I'd be a valuable team member, come up with neat stuff, etc, I ended up getting assigned to bug fix after bug fix) when I was told that I absolutely needed to drop everything and work on getting a new QA server set up. So I did. I got in sometime in the morning and worked completely straight until 1900, no breaks of any sort, my coworker hovering over my shoulder and breathing tobacco-smoke-tinged breath on me. Finally, I finished what I could do, and with a splitting headache, I took my laptop and sat on one of our futons.
"Did you finish the bug fixes?" I look up to see my boss standing over me. "What?" I am the tiniest bit incredulous. "What's the status of the bug fixes?" "Not done." "Why not?" "Because you told me I had a new top priority." "Well, yes, but you have other priorities as well." Apparently "drop everything" has a different meaning for different people.
Anyway, this is pretty much par for the course. When I do get a moment to myself, I'm unable to just sit down and code. I can't just hack new code in between 5e6 other things; my mind doesn't work that way. I'm not blaming anyone else for this, either — I know I'm not getting anything done — but it sucks to want to be creating new code, to add a little piece of myself to our product, but to sit and fester when I have the chance to do so.
So I'm unproductive, unhappy, and unfocused. Yippee. This is not at all the environment I was promised when I was hired, and a number of coworkers have exactly the same cheated feeling. I'm the butt of all jokes, the person all odd jobs get handed to, and the assumption is always that I can pick up whatever crap J. Random Sloppy Coder left lying about. My suggestions are mocked, my self-esteem is shot, and at the core, I know only I can earn any respect for myself, but I'm sick of trying to impress these people. Oh, and when I had a deadline the next morning and did my best to stick to my word and have it ready, I was openly insulted for being so gauche as to spend the night at the office.
My resumé [quadium.net]'s up now, and I've got a few job offers coming in, but I don't know how firm they are, and I really don't want to leave one company in which I have stock options (no matter how few) and a decent salary for another one which might be just as bad.
I've taken to sitting around with our IT guy and posting to Slashdot. I don't feel like a vile festering leech; I'm actually helping get things done for the company, but it's not what I was hired to do, and I know that my "projects" are getting held up while I cower in the corner. I'm just hoping that I can work myself back up to writing something decent tomorrow or this weekend (yay for wasting my weekends doing a poor job of recovering the time lost during the week).
AND I HATE THE FLUORESCENT LIGHTS!!! They give me painful headaches and destroy my concentration. But what am I supposed to do? Sabotage the circuit breakers?
Whee. What a rant. :-P
If you're a manager, the one useful thing I hope you get from reading this post post is to give your people a chance to accomplish what you've assigned them, and treat them as competent professionals.
--
Re:sorry to say this (Score:4)
What do you mean GREED ??? (Score:4)
Micheal, you just threw everyone who works in the Valley down the drain. The millions who work here, not all are working for making millions the next day. We are here because we believed in something, we loved the work we were doing and we love the weather down here. Not just because we wanted to be millionaires (ofcourse the thought of that obviously helped). But the way you say it makes it look as if you were some high and mighty puratinist who never cared for a dollar and does editing and readiing all day. Yeah right. Go ask Andover.net..or else..Go figure.
I know its kinda Flaming.. But I just couldnt help it. The idiot had some nerve...
work attachment (Score:3)
As a side note, what do you think is a 'healthy' attachment to your company (if you're not the owner, etc.)? Should one feel obliged to work long overtime hours in order to further the goals of the place they work? Or should we always remember to work towards our own goals firstly?
What have you found yourself doing?
Very easy to relate to (Score:3)
Re:No job... (Score:3)
Take three junior level coding courses, and two gimme courses, and what do you get? 8:30AM to 4:30AM days, coding taking up a majority of this time. Oh, and since I work the local IT equivalent, that adds some more to the plate.
The thing is though, the classes are the killers- when I have three different courses in which I'm writing 75+ printed page programs at once (yes, they are simple, but it's the fact those 75 pages are in relatively short amounts of time...), that's insane coding time, much less debugging time. (And I'm a horrid coder, so up the debug time from normal..) Many times over the past three years I've become very sick from lack of sleep, over exertion, etc, even taking a couple of ambulance rides due to the times I neglect myself.
You say no job is worth what was put in. The problem is though, to get a job or keep a job these days, it sure seems that in many workplaces this is dead minimum. And each year the IT/development expectations grow.. so where does it stop? Should I just head to McDonald's now, or rough it out?
Put me first, then I'll have to leave school (any less hours, I lose scholarships, and any less coding, I won't grad. in time..). So, I lose my dreams. Put "the company" (or search for a job/degree) first, and then I end up losing my body, sanity, and God knows what else. So I still lose. If I didn't love my IT job so much, It seems like I should leave, because this appears a no win situation.
Re:sorry to say this (Score:3)
It's pretty unambiguous that "drop everything" means put this new thing first on your to-do list. The issue is really not whether or not one has other priorities, but whether or not one can do two jobs at once. Most people can't, and it's unreasonable to expect that introducing new work into a full schedule won't push everything else back.
Re:Don't get the logic problem (Score:3)
That's a given. People in these riddle villages are always excellent logicians.
My answer was 1, which seemed the only reasonable answer.
Here's my analysis:
1 person - A goes around town, sees no one marked. He leaves town at the end of the day. (Or on the second day -it's ambiguous.)
2 people - On the first day, A and B see each other. On the second day, they see the other is still around. They both leave, at the end of the second day or on the third day. I think this is supposed to be the answer.
3 people - A, B and C see each other on the first and second days. They all leave at the end of the third day or on the fourth day. This might also be the answer.
OK, I damn well want karma for this one!! ;-)
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Schadenfreude (Score:3)
German speakers: I'm wondering if this is along the lines of decadent/destructive pleasures ("tainted love") or if it's more like training for a marathon or putting up flaws in someone you love.
Also, I'm noticing more and more German borrowing in the hacker world. Is it just me? If it's not, any speculation on why?
And now that Altavista's owners are certifiably evil (having patented things like web crawlers), are there any other places we can go for translation needs?
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OT: slashdot is messed up (Score:3)
Are you on the Sfglj [sfgoth.com] (SF-Goth EMail Junkies List) ?
It's just not in the valley (Score:4)
Two years out of college back in 1988 or so I went to work for a "startup" in a small town. I was underpaid and worked long hours, while I didn't have stock options I had "promises" of an ownership stake and visions of store expansion into multiple locations. As time went on my responsibilities increased and my pay went up, not alot, but up. I would stay late to get a head start on the work for the next day. Allways trying to move the company forward. The crushing blow came when I realized that I had wasted 8 years and this "startup", wasn't ever going to get beyond the point where one person, the owner, could be rewarded well.
I was living to work instead of working to live.
So what did I do? I went back to school to get a CIS degree and here I am now ready to enter the brave new world.
best translation service I know (Re:Schadenfreude) (Score:3)
No it' not 'evil joy'. Its... (Score:3)
And that is why I risk being redundant here, but having read the other comments I got the impression that that really nice word gets off to negative. So...
Yes, it's true, it describes the joy you feel about other peoples misfortunes. I once got told (on German TV) that it is caused by the relieve that something bad that happened to someone else did not happen to you.
That can be something really bad if it happens to someone you dislike. I just felt really good about reading the Microsoft IIS hole gives System-level access [theregister.co.uk] article at The Register. This is really bad for Microsoft, but I laughed anyway. Or just because of that. That's one case of Schadenfreude here.
But usually it's the smaller tricks life plays on other people that make you feel this way. Like when you walk along with your buddy, he turns his head to look at 'the woman in the red dress' and bumps into something. Funny.
Or maybe if you sit together with some friends in the evening, and one of them spills wine over that ridiculous Hawaii shirt.
Most classic cartoons work this way. And they're damn funny. I'm sure in every coutry there are TV shows that feature home videos about kids falling off bicycles, dancers slipping and falling to the ground and various other people falling into/off stuff. That is supposed to be funny, too (I think it's not. But if I would have actually been there when these things happened, I would feel Schadenfreude).
But no, it's not funny to watch your best friend being run over by a truck. That would be sick, not Schadenfreude.
German has the advantage that virtually all words can be combined to form a new one. Sometimes they describe certain things pretty well. Some you might heared of are Weltanschauung, Fahrvergnügen, Autobahn, Kaffeeklatsch, Hinterland, Poltergeist. And yes, also the infamous Blitzkrieg. Blitz is lightning, Krieg is war. It is supposed to be a war that is over really quickly...
We use a lot of English words here. We even make up our own! A mobile phone is called 'Handy' in German. We have Showmasters. I have no idea why we do this. But you call a 'Dackel' Dachshund, don't you?
I rode a similar wave... (Score:5)
We were an Internet cafe, web portal, ISP, and computer store--and why not? Every one of those was making money back then.
Quickly enough, the CEO found it quite easy to just fire everybody but me and have me do everything. Don't read that sentence as hyperbole--I'm being quite literal. Eventually, I worked there, his wife was the secretary, and a middle-aged guy took on web design without being paid for 4 months (then, not at all).
I had EXCELLENT job security. The small town afforded no one who could replace me, and I was not about to go home without my paycheck. The CEO kept me paid, and I got bonuses if I seemed disillusioned (yes, I know that's poor business practice). When I was promised a Christmas bonus, I got it in writing. And I got it (a $1500 bonus is really nice when you're in high school). But nobody else was being paid.
Remember what I said about being a web portal? Imagine eFront, but more ghetto. We had tons of regional offices, who paid an absurd fee to be able to sell advertising space in a region of our web site (divided by state, county, and city). Eventually, as the CEO guzzled away the finances of the company and my moral side got the best of me, I did the only thing I could do:
I destroyed the company.
At that point, I'd get $50/hour when I came in on off-hours, and $20+ at normal times. But it felt like hush money, and as the regional license money was pissed away and not invested into the company, I knew we were going down the toilet, and I wasn't about to go with them. Of course, the FBI snooping around town helped me decide, as well.
I warned the regionals. Without me, the server would soon go down--it could maintain itself, to a degree, but if you have ever managed a 8 GB+ web site that's using FrontPage extensions to an extreme (yes, NT, sorry), you will know how unstable it can get. They prepared to wrest the company from my boss.
At that same time, he was preparing to leave town. He didn't want to go to jail, so he fled to California. The server was co-located, and I remotely managed it. My assistant, who was hired on later, also managed the checking account for our office location.
My paycheck was coming due, and the account had $600. I was owed $2000, and my co-worker was owed $800. We called to find out how we were getting paid, and we got the runaround. My co-worker liquidified the bank account, and kept it all (which I agreed to--since I had no expenses, I thought he might want to actually pay his bills and live). I moved all the office equipment into the back of my truck, and we sent out our resignations.
The company decided it was in their best interest to provide me with the hardware as payment, and then the CEO gave a horrid speech about how terrible employees we were to all the offices. They already knew the true situation, and have now taken the company from the CEO (in prison, I've heard).
The company never made it big, but I think that prevented them from dying in the dot-com crash. One of the regional offices appears to manage everything now, and they're doing a decent job, and offered to re-hire me, but I like college better.
However, from the experience, I learned a few things:
If you're being screwed, you should leave.
If you're watching someone be screwed, you should leave.
If you're screwing someone, then you're the CEO.
-k.
(sorry for the scattered nature of the post, I'm sleepy).
Re:I disagree. (Score:3)
Unions are necessary, but not to serve those in 'charge' of the union, but the worker. At the same time, people should have a choice to join unions if they so desire. If I know that a particular union is predatory, encourages laziness, and benefits the 'powers that be' instead of me as a worker, I should be allowed to not join that union, charge less for my services, and receives plenty of work contracts from employers because they too will recognize the corruptness of the union. This in turn will keep unions on their toes to make sure they have more productive members.
OR, if I knew a union was a great organization, one that fought for the little guy, and was well respected for the work of its members by employers in general, then I would choose to join that union. I could then benefit from the mass organization of productive workers.
The problem, as stated elsewhere in this thread, is when a union becomes a monopoly and all competition to their work ethic, no matter how good or bad it is, is stifled. That's when it becomes bloated and subservient to the greediness of it's leaders, much like communist or dictatorial regimes become corrupted by greed and general human sinfulness by those in control of the system. I can see the US heading this direction too in recent years, with many judges and elected officials taking campaign contributions from the corp's instead of from the little guys like you and I.
Re:overworked employees (Score:4)
Sorry for the brutality, but Bullshit.
Unions are a collective bargaining force. They are paid to make sure that the average member is happy. Unions do not allow for the reward of those people who excel, and do not allow for the (easy) removal of those who do not. Unions protect the job, not the person.
Without unions, those people who are excellent at their jobs would be better rewarded for it. Thos people who are poor at their jobs would be encouraged in to a new vocation which would perhaps be better in the long run.
Unions do nothing more than enforce mediocrity.
Never underestimate a person's ability to vote with their feet.
Moral of the story... (Score:5)
The education in this context, is not that it is bad or wrong to sell yourself or your sould to your job, the real lesson is that you should be more careful about who you sell your life to. There are jobs which are worth giving up your life for. Speak to Nuns. Speak to pop-stars.
Still, the lesson is that you need just reward, or the consequences are school-fees.
It is a great thing to see a person who is sold out to a good cause. It is OK to love your spouse, OK to love your kids, yet, for those with neither, it should be OK to love you job equally.
Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket. (Score:5)
So, with my new salary in hand I go off to the land of the high-tech, the SI Valley, the birthing place for the greats. Yeah, the land of high rents, outrageous gas prices, ludicrous state taxes and the best weather this earth has ever seen.
I arrive at the startup to find this mongoloid 'IT Manager'. My dreams of truly attaining a higher rank are smashed in a single moment. I have to get into a dick waving contest with a valley kid who covets Microsoft. We were officially deemed both IT Managers. I knew I just had to wait this loser out.
Finally, the hard rain falls and economics kicks in. Valley boy gets the boot and I get to pick up all the slack. Under-funding is abound. The two fools before me squandered $750,000 and I have no budget. The end result is a lot of time spent on AIM, email and Slashdot. Hopefully, I'll be moved from the IT group to something more intelligent, I can only hold my breath.
So here I am, smack in the middle of Silicon Valley during job-nuclear-winter. I'm afraid to get too cocky to be fired because jobs aren't growing on trees. So I keep coming back for budget-less existence. The one thing that stands out the most - the job I left which was paying rather well was sending me to school/training/etc. I received several certifications under their employ. Now I will get nothing, unless it is done under my own volition.
Here I am with my worthless stock, high rent and outrageous taxes from the foul state of California (good weather though). It's not all that bad, its really a long, almost paid vacation without any schooling.
All in all the company is interesting, I have the possibility of expanding my horizons with some new things to administer, and luckily this startup has weathered the storm of
Don't fall into the trap, and make sure a bonus, schooling/education/training is in the contract!
There is no free lunch.
Re:Schadenfreude (Score:5)
New economy, new cynicism, new faking (Score:4)
I wonder how long it will be before some instrument of the press sees that the profitability of these articles exceeds the number of available stories. What then? Hire a journalist with a creative talent and a fair technical vocabulary? Good heavens no! From the article:
About the writer
David Wadler is a writer, performer and techie in New York.
Dot Com (Score:4)