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Admin
My roof collapsed frist.
Admin
Why do I get the nagging feeling that this is a US-based operation?
Admin
Penny wise pound foolish. I wonder how much money they saved delaying apparently pretty obviously needed repairs to the building. Once you factor in the cost of the water damage, cleanup, and unscheduled loss of use of the facility from the collapse of a snow loaded roof; one of those record bonus earning executives ought to get walked out of the other building.
Admin
And on the next day another wave of e-mails arrived
"We would like to apologize for not being able to pay healthcare for those with neck and head injuries, please contact your supervisor for emotional support"
Admin
Developers could work from home. Offices are kind of last century.
Admin
I don't get it - where-tf is the wtf?
Admin
The correct idiom here is "a stitch in time saves nine"
Admin
Said an executive while cashing a record setting bonus.
Admin
Admin
I once working in a poultry slaughter house as network admin. I don't recall why, but for some reason the place had been (thankfully, only for a few weeks) overrun by flies. It sucked ass royally. I made noises about getting it fixed - maybe I'm weird, but I didn't want to have to deal with that crap - which only got commiserative non commitments from management. So I did what any rational person would do - I went down to maintenance, got a bug zapper, and hung it in my office. Actually, I figured that doing so would be so absurd that someone would do something about the frakkin flies, but it backfired on me. It solved my problem, so I quit complaining, and no one else dared complain, so management was happy. The flies eventually went away, but it took weeks. I left the bug zapper hanging as a memorial to common sense, and it hung there for years....
Admin
Please vacate these comments now!
Admin
Indeed. This is the state of our business today, where common sense is thrown out the window in the hope of lowering the budget (and kicking in the bonus incentives for the executives).
Admin
And where is the tech angle?
Admin
An elaborate mechanism to lay the whole R&D team off. The new average R&D expense for the industry is now 4.5%.
Admin
As long as the repair is pushed to the next fiscal year, the executives can collect their bonus for hitting cost cutting targets.
Admin
Sure they could, now to find a workplace that allows it
Admin
It is actually thrown out of the hole in the wall.
Admin
Executive job : You're doing it right !
Captcha : iusto (latin of iustus = right) :D
Admin
Common sense, like hot air, rises. It goes straight out the roof.
Admin
Because in the UK we have health and safety.
As soon as the roofs started leaking, the office would've been filled with "Slippery when wet" signs. Then it would've been closed down because the signs were obstructing fire evacuation routes.
Admin
I work in an office in the UK that has a leaky roof. I can confirm at least half of this.
Admin
A building has been structurally compromised and Greg thinks along the lines that people can keep working if they don't have rubble on their desks.
Flee! Flee from this wretched organization!
Admin
Such a shame. Had she just delayed getting her coffee for a minute, she could have made a killing from workman's comp.
Admin
Call me picky, but I generally will only work for companies that have hot water available.
(As I write this, I remember that one of the sinks in the bathroom has a broken faucet that won't run hot water.)
Admin
One weekend back in '94, a building I worked in had its roof fall in. The building had only a single floor, and the roof came down and thoroughly crushed someone's desk. Usefully, it was Sunday, and only one person (the development manager) was in the office, although it wasn't his desk that got crushed.
The building was, however, shitcanned, because of all the asbestos in the roof. A specialist hazmat cleanup firm was brought in to recover all the salvageable equipment, and the developers were dispatched to a corner of what amounted to a warehouse.
Admin
I love how to cut costs they remove things like taking time to refactor code and fix leaky roofs, but presumably leave in "important" things which are 99% of the time useless crap (pretty new feature for Clueless Client X that doesn't need to be done)
Sadly yes this is "business as usual" in the USA. As long as the executives get hefty bonuses, that's all that matters. Go capitalism!
And to the guy who said about developers working from home; good luck finding a place smart enough to allow that. Most places seem to be stuck in the factory mentality. I've noticed that this epidemic is primarily in companies established and owned/operated by the older generation; the ones who remember a time before the advent of the internet and the virtual office. A company started by a younger person ingrained in the digital world is much more likely to allow, if not support entirely, remote work, while your typical 10+ year old established business owned by a 40-something (or older) person is going to treat workers like this was still the 80s, because the last time that person worked at a job (as opposed to being the owner) there was no (or very limited) internet, and nobody even thought of working remotely; that mentality gets carried over by the owner and infects everyone. You get some exceptions of course, but usually middle aged owner of an established company = 1980s worker mentality.
Admin
Admin
It's highly variable. I worked for a company that owned all its own buildings, and then eventually sold them to a management company and leased them back.
Admin
Perhaps literally.
Admin
I like it. Work it up a little and you've got a good development practices blog post.
CAPTCHA: pecus, as in "Pecus Bill" Did they get a new word for the captchas while I've been away?
Admin
In my experience, it's always toilets that leak in the UK, not roofs.
Admin
We have a relatively young company, less than 3 years. The owners are less than 40. And we require devs to be at the provided desk during normal working hours.
There are several reasons for this. Some people will happily put in the requisite hours to get the job done; while others will just as happily stretch out a project while no one is looking. I'd like to say it was only contractors that I've had this experience with but sadly that's not true.
With them in the office, it's actually pretty easy to tell who is making progress and who is blowing smoke. With them off site, I have no idea if that data load of 100 records is really taking them 8 hours or if they spent 7 hours with their kids at the Zoo and 30 minutes on the job.
In the past year, I've contracted 4 offsite devs to take care of 4 different tasks. 2 completely disappeared; 1 took a month before coming back with no idea how to compile / deploy the project and another 2 months to turn in absolute crap that had to be thrown out. The 4th? Well, it took 2 weeks before I got an email saying that he was going to do the task the way I asked for it...
And before you say I need to be on top of them with daily status reports, guess what, when they are in the office I can walk by and see what's happening. When they are out of the office I can call or send an email and easily be put off for a couple hours.
So, with those results I'll happily require devs to be onsite. At least when they are struggling it's a 30 second conversation instead of waiting for someone to pull their head out of their ass and ask a question via phone/email.
Admin
Or, you know, you could not care if they spend 8 hours or 30 minutes so long as it gets done. That's what salary is supposed to be: a flat rate of pay regardless of the hours you work, even if nobody seems to realize that (see the whole concept of "unpaid time off" for salaried employees)
Admin
The sad thing is it's true story. As for working it up, I'm no Remy or Alex :)
Admin
The nice thing is, it's a methodology, so it doesn't matter what you say, nobody will do it anyway. They'll just hire you to come in and tell them they're doing it right - everyone's a winner!
Admin
Do the world a favor. Remind any manager who thinks like this that they are turning themselves into a part of the machine that is easily replaceable by a cheaper one.
Admin
That sounds more like an argument of how you are better suited to managing individuals whom you can watch in person, rather than a critique of working from home. People can slack off just as easily in the office or at home, but in most offices the employee is more aware of when, and crucially when they are not, being spied on. Where I work, the policy for working at home is that you must be available on Lync for the majority of the time you are supposed to be working. It ensures that people can be consulted on things in the same time frame as in the office. Beyond this, providing they log time and accomplish goals the same, it should not matter.
Admin
+1 For the love of God, you're right.
Admin
Really should have gotten a business degree instead, now that I think of it. I mean, really, I've only ever seen one get fired and that was because our main customer called the owner and said, "He goes or we go".
Admin
Admin
Staying somewhere where you're working 60 hour weeks? I wouldn't put up with that shit unless the job was very good.
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Admin
My last job was at a crappy, US company with a lot of deadweight management and a hostile HR department. (Though, for me, it was a great place to work until my supervisor quit and all the crap he dealt with rolled down to me.) Nonetheless, when we had a heavy snowfall and heard the slightest creaking, we were all sent out of the building until it could be inspected.
So, that puts my complaints about that place in perspective.
Admin
Admin
Fixed that for you. The ONLY reason to ever put in more than 40 hours is if you are either the principal owner of the company or a partner (as in you own some real percentage of it, not "sweat equity" either). Any other time is being a sucker.
Admin
I don't know about you, but if I give someone a task that takes them 30 minutes, I don't send them home afterwards. I give them another task!
Admin
False comparison is false.
Capitalism inherently promotes the above. There is no "okay, we've accumulated enough wealth, let's focus on something else now." phase. That's what makes it capitalism you dolt. You're not a capitalist just because you go to work and earn money and spend it. You don't own the means of production just because you're the one who does the work. It's more complicated than that. Can you start a war? I mean, honestly put the pieces in motion that could result in some type of conflict between nations? No? You're a nobody, then. You don't gain anything from this system despite what they tell you.
The "policies" of Stalin and Mao are orthogonal to how wealth and prosperity can be thought of - I'm a voting socialist democrat. You're falsely attributing the behaviors of a tyrant, a dictator. If Socialism is an interface, you're only referring to the DictatorshipSocialism implementation, with a ConstantInterferenceByCapitalistsDecorator.
If your point was that attributing those behaviors to capitalism was "as wrong as" your comparison, you're still off, because again, those behaviors are the very spirit of capitalism. Take as much as you can, from anyone, from everyone.
Admin
Admin
Admin
I can confirm that here, a regional government in Western Canada (analgeous to county or district). Management is filled with people who are just counting down the clock till their full pension kicks in, so they're stuck in this "must be here" mentality. No telecommunting except in rare cases. The thing is, we're supposed to set the example for air quality, as that's one of our mandates - improving air quality.