go home Sean Young, you're drunk

Because:

- The pay is 2-3x what I could get paid at established firms
- The relationship-starting practices actually make sense (an interview amongst humans, often with C-levels, rather than with an HR-drone, and forms of testing that involve work on-product, rather than abstract and unrelated HR games).
- They are thankful to have me and pleasant to work with (as opposed to confronting the HR bureaucracy and middle management)
- I get better titles and better status/authority within the firm

I do good work, I produce value, and the startups that I work with see that and can measure it quantitatively. Established firms could if they wanted to, but that's the point: they don't want to. They want to pay you as little as they can get away with, and have you as silent and head-hung as they can get you to be.

I stopped working for stodgy HR- and middle-management-heavy firms years ago. It basically sucked, and was soul-sucking.

Companies want to talk about making yourself competitive in the labor market, then bitch and moan when those that will pay get all the hot talent?

Oh noez! Whatever will we do!?

I'd say that if someone gets paid $big_bucks at $hot_startup, they're entitled to it. If you want them, pony up.

company now:

- Pays less
- Is less secure
- Is a shitty environment
- Offers dwindling benefits
- And little respect

You're cannon fodder, that's all.

At startups and companies with that "hot startup" attitude (there are a few established companies that do this), you're the core of the business, the brains of the operation, worthy of any perks or cash they can throw at you.

Who wants to work where they're completely undervalued when they can work where they're (if anything) overvalued?

Make the salary at least reasonable, the hiring practices sane, the benefits good, and the job security reliable, and you'll find that a lot of young people are willing to work at stodgy old firms, just like they used to.

Employees are just tired of being treated like shit. These days hot startup > freelance/consult > established firm when it comes to the deal you get as a worker.

fly a gun inside

I paid $600 at one point for a used full-height hard drive that was made out of a solid hunk of alloy for the first hard drive for my PC.

So?

Way to let the point fly over your head.

By the time we were mid-'90s, we could get backup solutions that were—yes—$1,000 to $3,000 for the mechanism and $15-$30 for each piece of media.

But they:

- Would cover the space of most consumer drives at the time within 1-4 cartridges
- Would thus backup your entire consumer data library for $50-$150 per complete backup

This can't be done any longer. Not even close.

My point wasn't to get into a "history" pissing match. Sheesh, yes, also back in the day there were no such things as digital computers or hard drives or printing presses or even written script and everything had to be passed along as oral tradition, which meant that the cost of a backup was the cost of a human life.

As I said, this misses the point entirely. One might have hoped that in the process of getting here from the mid '90s we'd have gone forward rather than backward on the ability to make backups on removable storage media.

I can't find any data on MSRP now, but back in the day it seems to me that there were storage choices that were not so cost-prohibitive for consumers.

4mm and 8mm drives with multi-gigabyte capacities that compared favorably with hard drives of the time could be had for $hundreds to $a thousand or two, with media costs in the $10-$25 per tape range. At the time, there were also MO drives that had significant capacities in similar ranges, with slightly higher media costs.

Back then, the capacity of one removable cartridge/disk was much closer to the capacity of consumer market hard drives. You might have to go through 1-4 tapes or cartridges to back up all of your data, but that meant less than $100 for each additional complete backup set.

Now current consumer drive sizes are in the multi-terabyte range, while capacities of removable storage are such that you'll need 10-15 instances of media to back up your collection, and each media item is $50-$100. I have 18TB online right now. This means with a 300GB storage capacity, I'll need 30-45 instances of blank media for a single backup set. Back in the day, I had an Archive Python autoloader that used 4 DDS tapes and had a capacity of 96GB compressed, with a total online storage capacity of something like 40GB. In short, I had _excess_ capacity for less than $100 per backup set in a single operation.

At this level, it makes much more sense to just by a pile of multi-terabyte hard drives (4TB drives are currently less than $150 street price) and use them. Faster, cheaper, and without the up-front cost of the mechanism (backup drive) to pay for.

For consumers, dedicated backup technologies seem to have gone the way of the dodo.

The entire pro-choice movement is based on the concept of "My Body My Choice". You start forcing people to accept injections of anything into their bodies and you lose the moral basis for that argument. How do you "force" people to accept vaccines? Strap them down and inject them? Could anything be more frightening than the government forcing chemicals into someone's veins? That will make people even more anti-vaccine than ever.

I'm am very pro-vaccine. From childhood illnesses to flu to hpv, I want them all for myself and kids. And I have gotten into arguments with ignorant anti-vaccine people. What I have found is that they simply have lost all faith in "authority" because they have been lied to time and time again. WMD in Iraq! You can keep your insurance! Eat the food pyramid because you need to eat twice as much bread as you do veggies (not kidding, look it up). Leaders lie and lie and lie again to get what they want. Is it any wonder why people don't believe anything. In fact, it seems like the more forceful the denial the more likely the lie. You try and make vaccines mandatory you WILL make a bigger anti-vaccine movement.

I switched from iPhone to Android after using iMessage extensively and did not have this problem. So clearly it depends on some particular status/configuration of all the involved parties.

Does this depend on:

1) Moving the SIM from your old phone to your new phone
2) Leaving your old phone on and connected to WiFi so that iMessages still sees you as being on network

Or something like that?

I know that when I switched, it was a really quick thing—new Android phone arrived via USPS, pulled my old SIM, put it into new phone, turned off old phone, and away we went. I was in mid conversation with several people and never experienced a hiccup over the course of the day. Even talked about it over SMS—complained about the default keyboard on the new phone and all kinds of stuff.

Wasn't aware of this issue and didn't experience it. What gives?

post-industrialized nations, it's a pretty common thing to find that the failure to pay owed wages is considered a serious problem.

that is, until the state got involved thanks to myself and one other person. Then, one day, the building was locked, the board was gone to Europe, and all dozen or so employees were standing outside the door baffled and unpaid, from what I understand. I got out sooner, by about two pay periods, and got mine back before it *all* went down.

Congratulations, your hateful vitriol against people who believe differently than you does more to justify the need for this legislation than any argument supporters could make....

Tolerance comes in both directions. If you can't see the difference between refusing to serve someone based on skin color and refusing to go to and participate in a ceremony that your religion disagrees with, I genuinely feel sorry for your blind hatred.

the preceding post is an example of posturing

(facepalm)

I've had it with small companies. During the '00s I twice started with small companies only to hear "pay will be late" at the end of an early pay period, then "pay is just around the corner" by the end of the next pay period. In one case, the CEO simply never paid; I left before the third no-pay period was over, demanding that I be paid for my hours, to which he basically replied "so sue us!" I did—but only managed to recoup some of what I was owed. In the other case, they eventually paid but then promptly fired me for the noises I'd made about leaving due to two periods with no pay; that CEO had the gall to act infuriated and hurt at my lack of loyalty to the company.

So be sure that a small company with a low capital/revenue stream doesn't mean "You promise to do it for the love of the company if they can't afford to pay you."