Except again, only ONE of the people mentioned in the article is an immigrant. Every single other person is a US citizen.

It is somewhat reasonable that a company would want to recoup their expenses if an employee leaves before well before their contract is up, however, the companies in the article that are doing this aren't using at a way to recoup their 'losses', they are using it as a way to trap unsuspecting people into shitty jobs so that they can continue to take advantage of them.

Frankly, if a company is acting as unethically towards both their employees and their clients as these are they should have no grounds for attempting to collect any money whatsoever. If anything, it should be the other way around.

I don't think you actually read the article. If you did, you would have seen several cases discussed, not one. All with people quitting for good reasons - their safety (sexual harassment), safety of the clients (not enough nurses), or no actual training.

Only one of these involved an immigrant, who quit because he was the sole nurse caring for 40+ people, which is ridiculous.

Anecdotally I can tell you its fairly true. Most khmer speakers I know tend to use mix of voice messages, khmer with the standard english keyboard, english itself and khmer. Even when using something like google translate, people will usually try to use the voice transcription before using the khmer keyboards.

That very much depends on the company and the job. I've had 3 positions where juggling multiple jobs would not have caused any conflicts at all. In those cases, my employer would have been better off just hiring me as a part timer working on specific projects. With two of those the only reason it wouldn't have been possible is because they were at physical offices, but there was no real reason it couldn't have been done from home, that just really wasn't a thing at the time.

Just because you haven't had positions where you were able to do that doesn't mean that others haven't.

I considered doing this with my last job. I was the sole sysadmin/infrastructure/devops engineer there, but still had almost nothing to do 90% of the time. I doubt I worked more than 16 hours a week on average, probably less than 8 tbh. I got called for emergencies maybe once every couple of months, most of which took less than an hour to resolve. At least half of of those would have taken even less time if the developers hadn't tried to fix things on their own before calling me (my hours were radically different from everyone else)

Working a second job would have had no impact on the company at all, especially if it was a similar workload. I doubt they would have ever noticed. The only reason I didn't is because I hate job searching with a passion.

Sadly they decided to fire the entire technical team (except for me!) a couple of months ago and the work I would have been doing afterwards was decidedly uninteresting, so I've moved on.

I'm not sure how things will be at my new company yet, but so far it doesn't seem like it will be much different, but I'm not fully onboarded yet either. If I was just doing operations work, I think it would be fairly simple to balance another job. It seems like most of the issues that have popped up so far would be easy to automate away.

... what is this, 1997?

I don't think you'll find a single site to replace /., except reddit with specific subreddits.

But let's be honest, its never really been that great a site. It was good enough back in the day when it didn't have much competition, but that time has long since past.

The most important thing - do not micromanage. Trust your employees.

To be perfectly honest, you want to be in a position where the only thing you're doing is making sure they don't get overworked and aren't doing projects that don't make sense. All you need for that is a simple repeating team meeting where you talk about what you've been doing and whats coming up.

If you have a problem employee, deal with /that/ employee. Don't fuck the whole team because of one jackass.

In short, treat them like fucking professionals.

exactly. it doesn't really matter if you are there or not. eventually something is going to break in a new and interesting way that can't be fixed without a significant amount of work.

generally we try to have at least three systems for any production service so that we can still have redundancy while doing maintenance.

that said, I rarely come in for patching anymore. I just make sure I'm available in case something doesn't come up afterwards. (no binge drinking on patch nights!)

redundancy and proper monitoring make life much, much nicer.