...and remember, sometimes, "Go home, go home" (consider the Muppet characters) is the answer.

In my mid-forties, I worked for about two years with a former Baby Bell (now eaten). We were a startup division, meant to be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes. Management *very* frequently was running on the the apparent idea that you write all this stuff the way they do in the movies, and I heard "whatever it takes" *FAR* too fucking often. And it wasn't my manager, or even my director, it was upper management. I swore I'd never do that again, the week I broke 70 hours; my dba said the same thing the week he broke 80.

After about a year of this, my late wife made semi-serious jokes about suing the company for alienation of affection. Consider your family.

But we were just pikers. Anderson Consulting (now Accenture) treats their folks like consumables/disposable. One young guy - a lot of them, this was their first job out of college, and we had a *LOT* of them - on week did, and I kid you not, he told me 119 hours in one week. They had him in a motel down the road.... He was working for a different, and better, consulting company a year later.

That's crazy. You'll be vastly more productive if you go home and get a night's sleep, and DON'T THINK about work - your subconscious will do a better job of it that way.

Oh, and for the young fools who think this is the way things should be... my "normal" day was 9.5 - 10 hours/day (not counting lunch) - I did that crazy bunch of hours after the architecture team gave a Pronouncement that everyone had to get their prototype makefile modified so that they could do the nightly rebuild of everything, and when I asked where they were going to get the resources for that, they said they'd find it. Now, some teams were building manually, and some with shell scripts, and...so this was a good idea. But from their prototype?. A week later, all our managers got a letter wanting their senior tech person for a week to do it. This was the end of October. The second week in January, I stood up in the every morning meeting, and announced that I had validated their build.

I was the *very* *first* person to get it working. Experience *does* count, kiddies and CEOs, and you get what you pay for.

Oh, and the summer before I left, a friend who's a degreed praticing psychologist said it was her professional opinion that I was that close to clinical burnout... so, seriously, watch yourself, and keep open the option of saying goodbye.

                    mark

I know you don't do anything so twentietch-century as "reading novels", but certainly Doc Smith had force fields in the Skylark of Space, published 1928.

                mark

So, tell me why it is that you can't at least filter this crap? This *ain;t* the way slashdot was even five years ago, much less 10 or 15.

And as for this anon coward: boy, what is this? Your folks aren't reading this, so who are you trying to shock... or are you just going to point out "look what I posted" to the rest of your 15 yr old stupid buddies, who are so tough my cat would send you to the hospital, and you'd never touch him.

Or are you on something that oine of your "cool" buddies got you? You'll probably die before you're 23, having ingested something with, oh, drain cleaner.

Actually, that wouldn't be bad - it would get you out of the shallow end of the gene pool.

Go away, kid, you bother us.

                  mark

Let's see, when I got hired as a programmer in '80, we punched our own cards, and handed them in. As many times as we needed to. By '81? '82? We had time-shared terminals, and entered them online.

And this was a community college in the US.

          mark

Let's see, there's at least tens of thousands of SF anf Fantasy novels out there, maybe hundreds of thousands, and some have won awards as being well worth reading.

But we'll go come up with something that Hollywood producers (IQ == belt size) will understand, who will approach it with the following ideas
    1. We've got Names! We've got SPECIAL EFFECTS! Why would we need plot, continuity, stories worth watching?
                  All we need is EXPLOSIONS!!!
    2. All geeks are all stupid, and they'll watch anything we film, esp. if there's sexy babes and EXPLOSIONS!

            mark "so, when are they going to do, say Bujold's Miles series, or Robinson's Mars series, or...."

Please define "old people". Please define "physical labor".

And please define it in the context of Pete Seeger, a couple of years ago, at 93, splitting his own firewood. Or me, in my sixties, changing my own oil under the vehicle (I know, you don't know *how* to change your oil....)

                mark

I've got that on my router. Let me start by saying this is *NOT* the poster child for F/OSS. In fact, if you aren't seriously into hardware, or systems administration, DON'T! Never in my decades of professional work have I ever seen a project where people would talk about their "favorite builds"... in fact, I'd never *ever* thought of putting those two words together.

I wanted one thing besides gigabit routing: the ASUS I have says it can serve as a prntserver for USB printers. Call ASUS, "oh, not that printer". So three? four? debrickings later, and a month of trying, and asking, and finding by googling, not onlist, I found a build that works.

Most of the time. After somewhere between a day and a couple of weeks of not printing, it forgets about the printer, and I have to reset USB on it (and that was what I found after months of fighting).

I want to upgrade, to make sure I don't have heartbleed on it (but I do have no remote admin, so it should be ok)... but WHAT THE HELL DO I UPGRADE TO? Multiple builders, apparently no regression testing, no formal releases....

                    mark, putting up with it

For those of you here who have actually been around the block a few times, how many black or hispanic kids are there in in your kid's classes, as opposed to when you were a kid?

If you don't live in a city, how integrated is your neighborhood (oh, sorry, I know that (un)real estate agents get the cooties over that word, I meant "ethnically diverse")?

And if you personally can't deal with affirmative action because you think it kept you from getting into a school, or a job, then a) maybe there's another reason, like not enough of either, or b) maybe you *ain't* that good.

                        mark "and no, it won't help me personally"

Corn's incredibly harsh on the soil. It annually needs a lot of fertilizer (that is, modern corn). Biofuels - pretty much everyone before the corn lobby got into it was talking lots of other, easy, fast-growing *weeds*, like switchgrass comes to mind. No fertilizer, etc... I mean, it's a *weed*.

But agribusiness industry (petrochemicals into fertilzer, for example) aren't interested in *that*....

                mark

All the idiot 20-somethings and 30-somethings who are *SURE* they're going to be millionaires, and so want to make sure millionaires pay lower taxes than they are now. And they'll never need to worry 'bout healthcare, and of *course* they'll retire at 40.....

Allow me to reiterate: there are two kinds of Republicans, Libertarians, and neoConfederate "Tea Partiers": millionaires, and suckers.

                    mark

Depending on your tastes.... Mother Earth News?

                mark

First, as some other folks have said, give them a weekly list, not every day, or every time one's announced.

Actually, that might burn them out... or, they might decide to batch them on their own, and think they'll get to it eventually.

Here's one: give them a weekly list, AND INSIST on a weekly meeting to discuss it. EVERY WEEK, without fail, without cancellations. Tell them that you'll also want a spot meeting, when you get critical updates (like yesterday's Java from Oracle, with it's 4 that had a CVA rating of 10 on a scale of 10). Insist that if you get those, they need to meet that day, or the next, or give you the pre-approval to put those in without consulting them.

The weekly meetings will get to them in relatively short order, they being so busy and all....

Also, here's another pushback: do you have a testing group, that runs regression tests before regular updates, and especially on ermergency ones? If no, question the committee how they expect you to regression test everything. Also, do you have test, as opposed to development systems? If not, that's another budget item the board needs to approve..

Make them do that real job, professionally. See how much they hate doing it, and maybe it'll go away.

                    mark

Used to be social security in the US, you could retire at 65. Now... 62... but you get a third or more less monthly. 67 gets you your "full" amount, but if you wait till 70, you'll get more.

So, enjoy your jobs, and your bosses, and let's not forget that we have to spend for overpriced crap, so that CEOs can get their increasing millions, y'know. It would be *such* a hardship on them to pay what we pay in taxes, and maybe we could go back to retiring at 65 (oh, and opening up jobs for you kids....)

              mark

--
There are two kinds of Republicans and Libertarians: millionaires, and suckers.

Not looking at all the libertarians here, are you? Skimming their posts? It's *much* worse than it was 10 or 12 years ago....

              mark

Amen. The populace was to be armed to ->protect the country (A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State). There's *nothing* in that about self-defense, or collecting nuts. Now, in what way are the gun nuts "defending the US"? If they want to, they're free to join the US Army, or maybe the National Guard.

And how many gun nuts who read and post to slashdot have ever used one in "self-defense"? (And, if so, did the cops agree?)

Note that until around 1980, *ALL* the decisions of the SCOTUS were for what I say above. Since then, it's all part of the real right wing agenda, to make this country what it's become: the home of the cowards and the terrified (they're *so* much easier to control).

                mark, who grew up non-Black in a slum, has lived in rough city neighborhoods, and has *never*
                                          needed a gun... but then, I'm not scared shitless of Those People