The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

ObiWayneKenobi · 2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Realist:
Making sure people only work 8 hours a day and have enough disposable income is how corporations can survive. If you turn back the clock to 1700s where a farmer struggled to survive and only a rich minority could afford "luxuries" such as new clothes every year, the market was tiny
Those workers that many despise are actually consumers as well. Who will buy the products that factories produce? In the U.S. there are people with two jobs that still need food stamps to survive. Between work and sleep they have little time to consume

You should read what Henry Ford had to say about this:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay

And the worst part is that this never evolved further. When you're working six days, working five is an improvement. But this should have moved down to working four days and being paid for five a long time ago.

PiisAWheeL · 2012-12-04 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
Realist:
Making sure people only work 8 hours a day and have enough disposable income is how corporations can survive. If you turn back the clock to 1700s where a farmer struggled to survive and only a rich minority could afford "luxuries" such as new clothes every year, the market was tiny
Those workers that many despise are actually consumers as well. Who will buy the products that factories produce? In the U.S. there are people with two jobs that still need food stamps to survive. Between work and sleep they have little time to consume

You should read what Henry Ford had to say about this:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay

And the worst part is that this never evolved further. When you're working six days, working five is an improvement. But this should have moved down to working four days and being paid for five a long time ago.

Don't worry, now that we have obama care, full time is now 30 hours a week. But I don't think you are getting paid for the extra ten.

ObiWayneKenobi · 2012-12-04 Reply Admin

PiisAWheeL:
ObiWayneKenobi:
Realist:
Making sure people only work 8 hours a day and have enough disposable income is how corporations can survive. If you turn back the clock to 1700s where a farmer struggled to survive and only a rich minority could afford "luxuries" such as new clothes every year, the market was tiny
Those workers that many despise are actually consumers as well. Who will buy the products that factories produce? In the U.S. there are people with two jobs that still need food stamps to survive. Between work and sleep they have little time to consume

You should read what Henry Ford had to say about this:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay

And the worst part is that this never evolved further. When you're working six days, working five is an improvement. But this should have moved down to working four days and being paid for five a long time ago.
Don't worry, now that we have obama care, full time is now 30 hours a week. But I don't think you are getting paid for the extra ten.

If you are on salary (as most of us IT pros are) then it shouldn't matter; unfortunately it seems many companies either don't understand that salary is meant to be a fixed amount of pay regardless of the hours, or just don't care - every company I have ever worked for has felt free to dock my pay the equivalent hourly rate if I missed a day had was not eligible for/didn't have PTO, but the days I worked extra got the old "No overtime pay for you, you're salary" routine. Strange, if you don't have to pay more for > 40 hours, then you shouldn't pay less for < 40 hours, yet everyone does.

PiisAWheeL · 2012-12-04 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
PiisAWheeL:
ObiWayneKenobi:
Realist:
Making sure people only work 8 hours a day and have enough disposable income is how corporations can survive. If you turn back the clock to 1700s where a farmer struggled to survive and only a rich minority could afford "luxuries" such as new clothes every year, the market was tiny
Those workers that many despise are actually consumers as well. Who will buy the products that factories produce? In the U.S. there are people with two jobs that still need food stamps to survive. Between work and sleep they have little time to consume

You should read what Henry Ford had to say about this:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay

And the worst part is that this never evolved further. When you're working six days, working five is an improvement. But this should have moved down to working four days and being paid for five a long time ago.
Don't worry, now that we have obama care, full time is now 30 hours a week. But I don't think you are getting paid for the extra ten.

If you are on salary (as most of us IT pros are) then it shouldn't matter; unfortunately it seems many companies either don't understand that salary is meant to be a fixed amount of pay regardless of the hours, or just don't care - every company I have ever worked for has felt free to dock my pay the equivalent hourly rate if I missed a day had was not eligible for/didn't have PTO, but the days I worked extra got the old "No overtime pay for you, you're salary" routine. Strange, if you don't have to pay more for > 40 hours, then you shouldn't pay less for < 40 hours, yet everyone does.

Yes but with obamacare EMPLOYERS must pay for health insurance for (or pay the fine) "full time" employees. Full time employees are defined as "working 30 or more hours". They don't care if you are paid salary or not. So if you live in the US you may see an hour (and probably a matching pay) cut before the end of next year. I just hope enough states opt out to make it fail cause it is the most detrimental thing to our economy right now.

ObiWayneKenobi · 2012-12-04 Reply Admin

PiisAWheeL:
ObiWayneKenobi:
PiisAWheeL:
ObiWayneKenobi:
Realist:
Making sure people only work 8 hours a day and have enough disposable income is how corporations can survive. If you turn back the clock to 1700s where a farmer struggled to survive and only a rich minority could afford "luxuries" such as new clothes every year, the market was tiny
Those workers that many despise are actually consumers as well. Who will buy the products that factories produce? In the U.S. there are people with two jobs that still need food stamps to survive. Between work and sleep they have little time to consume

You should read what Henry Ford had to say about this:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay

And the worst part is that this never evolved further. When you're working six days, working five is an improvement. But this should have moved down to working four days and being paid for five a long time ago.
Don't worry, now that we have obama care, full time is now 30 hours a week. But I don't think you are getting paid for the extra ten.

If you are on salary (as most of us IT pros are) then it shouldn't matter; unfortunately it seems many companies either don't understand that salary is meant to be a fixed amount of pay regardless of the hours, or just don't care - every company I have ever worked for has felt free to dock my pay the equivalent hourly rate if I missed a day had was not eligible for/didn't have PTO, but the days I worked extra got the old "No overtime pay for you, you're salary" routine. Strange, if you don't have to pay more for > 40 hours, then you shouldn't pay less for < 40 hours, yet everyone does.
Yes but with obamacare EMPLOYERS must pay for health insurance for (or pay the fine) "full time" employees. Full time employees are defined as "working 30 or more hours". They don't care if you are paid salary or not. So if you live in the US you may see an hour (and probably a matching pay) cut before the end of next year. I just hope enough states opt out to make it fail cause it is the most detrimental thing to our economy right now.

My state (Florida) was one of the first to jump on it, and the vote to opt out was soundly defeated. Yay stupid white trash.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Elron the Fantastic:
With all do respect, you have a very "saturday morning cartoon villain" view of business leaders, and no real understanding of running a business. Certainly you may decrease your costs by making such unreasonable phone calls to lower costs for everyone, but the deminished productivity of those facilities would seriously damage the long-term profitability of those facilities and would very quickly get that leader a meeting with a very angry board of directors. Businesses cannot survive if they make such whimsical choices - they must plan for the long term.
Also, if you really want to cut costs in that fashion, you don't diminish the costs of each facility by X%, you close X% of your facilities. That's just economics 101.

Sure, the "saturday morning cartoon villian" portrayal was some theatrical license on my part. I mean, not all of these business leaders have yachts. Some of them just have to make do with a Lexus instead. Yes, I was painting a picture, but it's a picture based on several people that I've met and others that I see every day here in Chicago.

You do have a point about closing X% of facilities rather than cutting the costs of each facility by X%. That's what would be more likely to happen. But in the end, roughly the same number of people would lose their jobs and/or their health. If I have six factories employing 2,000 people each, it doesn't matter whether I fire 50% of the people at each factory or if I close three factories; either way 6,000 people get fired. The exact approach would be different, but the ethical and philosophical considerations would be nearly the same.

But your point about diminishing the long-term profitability of the business is part of my point. Investors are in it to get their ROI. Once they have that, and they've liquidated their holdings, what do they care about whether the business is around for another two decades or two months? Executives are in it to get their quarterly or annual bonuses. It happens every day that an executive does something great for short-term profit and lousy for long-term profit, and gets rewarded for it. The compensation structure for executives is set up to reward this sort of approach. In the USA, at least, shareholders can even take an executive to court if they don't focus enough on short-term profitability!

In the specific case I described, sure, it's an even more short-sighted decision than usual, but trading long-term stability for short-term profit is common in the business world. J. Random Bossman is going to go to the board of directors and he's going to say, "I just improved our quarterly profit projection by 44%," and they'll all look at how much that improved their stock portfolio, and forgive him. And even if they don't forgive him, so what? The worst they could do is fire him and give him more time to hang out on his yacht with his two million bucks. I would love to have problems like that.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Bub:
Jazz:
Everyone's life is improved, including Jim-Bob's, because he was forced to part with his property against his will.

Or Jim Bob could choose to not have a road going to his house, install his own well, buy a gun, pay for private emergency coverage, save a bunch of money, and not submit to the 'force' of the mob.

Do you even read? Jim-Bob would actually LOSE MORE MONEY in that scenario, because as it turns out, the cost of digging and maintaining his well, purchasing his gun, and paying for private emergency coverage is FAR MORE than the taxes he would pay to the city to provide those things.

He also loses a great deal of opportunity cost because, since he is not entitled to use the city's roads, he spends much more of his time getting to and from work on foot, or horseback I guess.

Jim-Bob would not save any money. He will pay roughly an order of magnitude MORE.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Tom:
Jazz:
the capacity of the capital that I own to actually produce products has gone DOWN
So how are you going to produce a positive return on investment again next quarter?

Who said anything about next quarter? Man, I got my two million dollar bonus already. If next quarter looks like it isn't going well, I'll just retire. Then whoever takes over after me gets blamed for the lousy profits, and I get to spend two million dollars from the deck of a yacht.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

justme:
Tom:
Jazz:
the capacity of the capital that I own to actually produce products has gone DOWN
So how are you going to produce a positive return on investment again next quarter?
I am going to quit this CEO position a la Mark Hurd.

Precisely. Also note that Mark Hurd was paid more than 30 million dollars (12 million in severance and another 22 million in stock options) just to resign. To resign!

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Jazz:
Bub:
Jazz:
Everyone's life is improved, including Jim-Bob's, because he was forced to part with his property against his will.

Or Jim Bob could choose to not have a road going to his house, install his own well, buy a gun, pay for private emergency coverage, save a bunch of money, and not submit to the 'force' of the mob.

Do you even read? Jim-Bob would actually LOSE MORE MONEY in that scenario, because as it turns out, the cost of digging and maintaining his well, purchasing his gun, and paying for private emergency coverage is FAR MORE than the taxes he would pay to the city to provide those things.

He also loses a great deal of opportunity cost because, since he is not entitled to use the city's roads, he spends much more of his time getting to and from work on foot, or horseback I guess.

Jim-Bob would not save any money. He will pay roughly an order of magnitude MORE.

This. Bub is taking "not-invented-here" to a whole new level.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Jazz hit it on the head. His theatrical license was, I thought, for the sake of humor or relief - not congruent to the portrayal of the behavior.

You don't need any artistic license or imagination. It's in the papers - frequently.

The behavior is justified. It makes sense. It's only wrong when you attribute it to be wrong. Which we seem to be doing and others seem to be opposing based on the right to ownership.

Libertarianism is a defeated ideology. It's invocation is a source of mockery, a signal that you don't really want to think progressively or at a capacity that reflects the modern era, the humanist side of policy making. A sign that you endorse, as it has been said already, barbarism.

Between simple summaries and some other more detailed criticisms it's a pretty open-shut case unless you're deficient in reading comprehension or otherwise just can't let go.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

In the late 1990's, working at a small ISP, I learned empirically of a reliable indicator for when you need to spruce up and circulate your resume:

When the big bottle on top of the water dispenser stays empty.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Before public education in America, the schools were funded by communities who got college educated teachers to teach their children all together, and our reading levels were the highest in the world. Now we're 35th (correct me if I'm wrong) in the world for reading. My state in particular leads the nation in high school dropouts.

This is a false line of reasoning. Education was far from universal. Neither was it college-level. Moreover, unlike today, lack of formal academic education was not nearly the barrier to earning a living that it is today. Native smarts and a willingness to work hard could take you very far even absent an education.

I would also hope that it would be clear that under this scheme the poorest people would receive the worst education or none at all.

You talked about greedy businessmen who only care about "profit". Do you honestly believe the politicians who have to get campaign donations and votes are any different?

In the current system probably not. But it is not the nature of the politician's job that he work against the interests of those he represents. We have a political system where money is used to induce this behavior. A politician will often find that taking actions that serve the majority of citizens or society at large is also in his electoral self-interest.

The main interest of the corporation is profit, not society. Corporations will freely take actions that are against the broader interest of the nation (say pollute the water supply) if such an action is profitable in the short-term. Only a government with sufficient authority can deter this behavior by rendering it unprofitable (fines, jail terms for execs, etc.).

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Sorry. First post. Meant to quote Elron.

Elron the Fantastic:
Before public education in America, the schools were funded by communities who got college educated teachers to teach their children all together, and our reading levels were the highest in the world. Now we're 35th (correct me if I'm wrong) in the world for reading. My state in particular leads the nation in high school dropouts.

This is a false line of reasoning. Education was far from universal. Neither was it college-level. Moreover, unlike today, lack of formal academic education was not nearly the barrier to earning a living that it is today. Native smarts and a willingness to work hard could take you very far even absent an education.

I would also hope that it would be clear that under this scheme the poorest people would receive the worst education or none at all.

Elron the Fantastic:
You talked about greedy businessmen who only care about "profit". Do you honestly believe the politicians who have to get campaign donations and votes are any different?

In the current system probably not. But it is not the nature of the politician's job that he work against the interests of those he represents. We have a political system where money is used to induce this behavior. A politician will often find that taking actions that serve the majority of citizens or society at large is also in his electoral self-interest.

The main interest of the corporation is profit, not society. Corporations will freely take actions that are against the broader interest of the nation (say pollute the water supply) if such an action is profitable in the short-term. Only a government with sufficient authority can deter this behavior by rendering it unprofitable (fines, jail terms for execs, etc.). This is where I would draw the line for "big enough, but no bigger".

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Jazz:
justme:
Tom:
Jazz:
the capacity of the capital that I own to actually produce products has gone DOWN
So how are you going to produce a positive return on investment again next quarter?
I am going to quit this CEO position a la Mark Hurd.

Precisely. Also note that Mark Hurd was paid more than 30 million dollars (12 million in severance and another 22 million in stock options) just to resign. To resign!

I have often heard this quote against welfare: "If you pay people to be poor, there will be poor people."

But what about this? That was not the first time we have heard of an executive being paid to leave because they screwed up so much. Some thing If you reward failure, who cares if I fail? So I cut deep to the bone, I get a bonus for cutting and then get a severance to leave because I sent it into the ground.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

ObiWayneKenobi:
Realist:
Making sure people only work 8 hours a day and have enough disposable income is how corporations can survive. If you turn back the clock to 1700s where a farmer struggled to survive and only a rich minority could afford "luxuries" such as new clothes every year, the market was tiny
Those workers that many despise are actually consumers as well. Who will buy the products that factories produce? In the U.S. there are people with two jobs that still need food stamps to survive. Between work and sleep they have little time to consume

You should read what Henry Ford had to say about this:

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/HENRY_FORD:_Why_I_Favor_Five_Days%27_Work_With_Six_Days%27_Pay

And the worst part is that this never evolved further. When you're working six days, working five is an improvement. But this should have moved down to working four days and being paid for five a long time ago.

I once watched a program on TV. Germany was in trouble. Someone said they could not afford all the "benefits" they gave there workers ( decent pay, healthcare, etc ) and asked ,"Why don't you adopt this model. It would be better for the economy." And the reply was along the lines of "Yes, but not at the expense of the workers. We don't want to live in a world like that."

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

If you need to get the developement budget from 15% of the total budget to 12% of the total budget, point out that adding 25% of the current total budget to executive bonuses meets that goal without reducing anybody's budget.

2012-12-04 Reply Admin

Geoff:
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.

I see we've got a comedian here.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

NotHere:
ObiWayneKenobi:
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.

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.

I'm a tech lead, and I completely agree with this. I was on the other side of the fence untill I had to actually manage a team. Now, I don't even really like to work at home myself due to all of the distractions. It's also much harder to collaborate with people when you can't just sit down next to them and hash it out.

Working remote seems to only work well if you have a specific and sufficiently sized deliverable that you can work in isolation on.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

Dave Insurgent:
Jazz hit it on the head. His theatrical license was, I thought, for the sake of humor or relief - not congruent to the portrayal of the behavior.
You don't need any artistic license or imagination. It's in the papers - frequently.

The behavior is justified. It makes sense. It's only wrong when you attribute it to be wrong. Which we seem to be doing and others seem to be opposing based on the right to ownership.

Libertarianism is a defeated ideology. It's invocation is a source of mockery, a signal that you don't really want to think progressively or at a capacity that reflects the modern era, the humanist side of policy making. A sign that you endorse, as it has been said already, barbarism.

Between simple summaries and some other more detailed criticisms it's a pretty open-shut case unless you're deficient in reading comprehension or otherwise just can't let go.

What a lot of adolescent nonsense. Derisive dismissal is a sign of immaturity. I know a few big-L Libertarians (and more small-l ones) and find them to be extremely insightful people prepared to address serious issues with a focus on protection of rights over mindless ideology.

Some of their views are rather grating at times, but I have yet to really identify a fundamental lack of consistency - unlike 'other' loudmouths I have encountered.

Far from being defeated, I suspect it is experiencing a genesis. Time will tell.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

Bub:
Dave Insurgent:
Jazz hit it on the head. His theatrical license was, I thought, for the sake of humor or relief - not congruent to the portrayal of the behavior.
You don't need any artistic license or imagination. It's in the papers - frequently.

The behavior is justified. It makes sense. It's only wrong when you attribute it to be wrong. Which we seem to be doing and others seem to be opposing based on the right to ownership.

Libertarianism is a defeated ideology. It's invocation is a source of mockery, a signal that you don't really want to think progressively or at a capacity that reflects the modern era, the humanist side of policy making. A sign that you endorse, as it has been said already, barbarism.

Between simple summaries and some other more detailed criticisms it's a pretty open-shut case unless you're deficient in reading comprehension or otherwise just can't let go.

What a lot of adolescent nonsense. Derisive dismissal is a sign of immaturity. I know a few big-L Libertarians (and more small-l ones) and find them to be extremely insightful people prepared to address serious issues with a focus on protection of rights over mindless ideology.

Some of their views are rather grating at times, but I have yet to really identify a fundamental lack of consistency - unlike 'other' loudmouths I have encountered.

Far from being defeated, I suspect it is experiencing a genesis. Time will tell.

It was good of you to put such words as "adolescent", "nonsense", "immaturity" and "mindless ideology" close to "Libertarians". They sit well together. Consistency is no measure of the merit of any philosophy or ideology. In fact, science is, probably, the most inconsistent thing you could imagine: in light of knowledge, evidence, it always changes - and it is our most valued manner of thinking.

Attempting to deride your beliefs was only a return of the favor for you sit smugly self-assured of your righteousness, flinging your rhetoric and feigning enlightenment over the rest of us... despite very well put criticisms of the practicality and morality, among other things, of libertarianism.

To assert that if my dismissal had been more tactful, it would change the absurdity of your beliefs, is just as absurd. More so, the criticisms I linked are not at all derisive - you made no effort to respond or acknowledge them (just as you made no effort to respond to acknowledge numerous rebuttals I made throughout these posts).

Make no mistake, I respect your right to be a fool - but I reserve my right to ridicule you for it. I do so in the light of reason and thought. You defend yourself with rhetoric and appeals to abstraction.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

...

In fact, it is your declared significance of consistency that would appear to contribute to your poor thinking, for some logical fallacies present themselves out of the intent to discredit one based on a basis of inconsistency (such as between what was done yesterday, compared to today, or what one suggests should be done, compared to what they do or in contrast to their character). It is through this that I suspect you impede your ability to reason, and a poorly reasoned ideology appeals to you.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

Dave Insurgent:
...
In fact, it is your declared significance of consistency that would appear to contribute to your poor thinking, for some logical fallacies present themselves out of the intent to discredit one based on a basis of inconsistency (such as between what was done yesterday, compared to today, or what one suggests should be done, compared to what they do or in contrast to their character). It is through this that I suspect you impede your ability to reason, and a poorly reasoned ideology appeals to you.

Not my ideology at all. You're the one with the bizarre obsession with maligning it, and it's adherents.

It's all so easy to blather on in a forum such as this....and pointlessly so....so I'll simply restate "time will tell"

If you think you can accomplish better results, go for it....but it'll require much more actual work than just blowing steam on the intertubes

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

Bub:
Dave Insurgent:
...
In fact, it is your declared significance of consistency that would appear to contribute to your poor thinking, for some logical fallacies present themselves out of the intent to discredit one based on a basis of inconsistency (such as between what was done yesterday, compared to today, or what one suggests should be done, compared to what they do or in contrast to their character). It is through this that I suspect you impede your ability to reason, and a poorly reasoned ideology appeals to you.

Not my ideology at all. You're the one with the bizarre obsession with maligning it, and it's adherents.

It's all so easy to blather on in a forum such as this....and pointlessly so....so I'll simply restate "time will tell"

If you think you can accomplish better results, go for it....but it'll require much more actual work than just blowing steam on the intertubes

I vote. I encourage my family to vote, and I encourage them to read and think prior to doing so. We don't agree on various subjects, sometimes leading to voting for different parties. That's fine. As far as actual work goes, you might consider actually reading some of the criticisms I linked. Just because they disagree with you and admit so upfront doesn't detract from their validity, their value, or mean you're being intelligent by avoiding or dismissing them.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

Dave Insurgent:
Bub:
Dave Insurgent:
...
In fact, it is your declared significance of consistency that would appear to contribute to your poor thinking, for some logical fallacies present themselves out of the intent to discredit one based on a basis of inconsistency (such as between what was done yesterday, compared to today, or what one suggests should be done, compared to what they do or in contrast to their character). It is through this that I suspect you impede your ability to reason, and a poorly reasoned ideology appeals to you.

Not my ideology at all. You're the one with the bizarre obsession with maligning it, and it's adherents.

It's all so easy to blather on in a forum such as this....and pointlessly so....so I'll simply restate "time will tell"

If you think you can accomplish better results, go for it....but it'll require much more actual work than just blowing steam on the intertubes

I vote. I encourage my family to vote, and I encourage them to read and think prior to doing so. We don't agree on various subjects, sometimes leading to voting for different parties. That's fine. As far as actual work goes, you might consider actually reading some of the criticisms I linked. Just because they disagree with you and admit so upfront doesn't detract from their validity, their value, or mean you're being intelligent by avoiding or dismissing them.

Believe it or not, there are much more efficient ways of keeping abreast of differing ideological, philosophical & economic arguments (be they coherent or not) than chasing down every link posted by self-important soi disant 'intellectual' keyboard commandos.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

You could have just said "but I don't wanna!"

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

AN AMAZING CODER:
NotHere:
ObiWayneKenobi:
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.

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.

I'm a tech lead, and I completely agree with this. I was on the other side of the fence untill I had to actually manage a team. Now, I don't even really like to work at home myself due to all of the distractions. It's also much harder to collaborate with people when you can't just sit down next to them and hash it out.

Working remote seems to only work well if you have a specific and sufficiently sized deliverable that you can work in isolation on.

So, I'll confess to being an over-40, but I'm a big fan of having employees working in the office for all the reasons outlined above plus the fact that it allows employees to define work-life balance. I've had developers tell me that they prefer working in the office to working at home because, when they're working from home, they find themselves working more hours simply because they can and losing family time. Coming to the office helps them to draw a line between work time and family time.

2012-12-05 Reply Admin

Jazz:
Jack:
Every time "A" trades with "B" they do so because both of them expect to be happier after the trade. That additional happiness is called profit and they both enjoy it.
Every profit-making transaction, invariably must make the world a better place, because it makes both parties happier. Profits are a measure of how much good one has done.

Unless there's violence involved. If "A" forces "B" to part with property, that is not free trade. That is theft, and it is always harmful in the net analysis, though it may benefit the recipient of the stolen goods.

Let's see: False, false, and false.

When I am forced to buy, say, a city sticker for my automobile, I don't expect to be happier after it. The city chamber of commerce doesn't expect to be "happier" after it (how exactly do you measure the "happiness" of a legal entity, anyway?). It's just something that's in an ordinance and therefore I must legally do it whether it makes me happier or not. In fact, frequently I make transactions with the expectation that I will be UNHAPPIER after the transaction. Have you ever bought tickets to go see a movie with your significant other that you knew you were going to hate, but did anyway because your S.O. pressured you into it? Or how about when my employer raises the rates on our health insurance because the insurance company's saleslady showed him a good time last Friday? I certainly don't expect to be any happier after paying the extra $100/month and getting the exact same coverage. So the happiness test fails miserably, right out of the gate.

The second claim -- that all transactions must make the world a better place -- relies on the first claim and therefore already has been shown false, but let's approach this from a different direction. If all transactions MUST make the world a better place, then the simplest way to make the world better and better every day would be for just two people to keep trading ALL the world's wealth between them. Right? If all the world's wealth is changing hands once per day, then each of those transactions must be making the greatest possible amount of improvement in the world. And therefore if you just had two people, trading the money back and forth as fast as possible, the world would get better... and better... and better! Right? Except that it only takes three or four brain cells to realize that if only two people controlled all the world's wealth, eight billion people would starve to death. So that would actually mean the world is getting worse. So there's a contradiction if we start from the premise that all transactions must make the world a better place. So that's false too.

Lastly, the idea that A taking B's property against their will is ALWAYS harmful in the net analysis is also false. Let's say you have a city of 10,000 people. This city needs streets, sewers, water, power, police forces, EMTs, and firefighters. All 10,000 people get together and they decide between two options. They can either (a) each individually hire someone to build roads to their houses, someone to pump water to their home, someone to patrol the streets, someone to take them to the hospital when they have a heart attack, or they can (b) pool their resources and collectively buy these services in bulk, at "wholesale" rates. If they go with option (a), the individualistic method, each person may need to pay $75,000 each year (that's assuming that the policeman, EMT, and firefighter that each person hires doesn't mind working for about $20k... which is a hell of an assumption). But if they go with option (b), they are going to pay about $90,000,000 collectively, but that works out to only $9,000 per person. Now, Jim-Bob in the back row is a stubborn old man and refuses to vote for the collective purchase option (b). He'd like to buy all his own services. But he gets outvoted by everyone else, because they don't have an extra $75k lying around. Now the other citizens are forcing Jim-Bob to give up $9,000 against his will, but it is easy to demonstrate that for them to do so benefits Jim-Bob greatly. He's getting all the same services he would have paid for anyway, but at an 88% discount! He gets to keep that extra $66k and use it to bring himself other happiness. It also benefits the rest of the citizens of the town, in that Jim-Bob's participation allows them to also receive this discount. Everyone's life is improved, including Jim-Bob's, because he was forced to part with his property against his will.

So... zero for three. But keep going, please!

Qualify the first with "voluntary" (voluntary exchange), as was probably intended, and that fixes it.

You dropped profit-making from the second, which would put paid to the "circulate the world's cash for infinite happiness" idea. Intentional deception or accident?

You can't measure utilities, but harm caused can be at least observed, if perhaps not compared well: and in the contrived example, Jim-Bob is harmed if extorted by the majority voters and not if not. Net harm for coercing him to pay is trivially greater than none at all.

2012-12-06 Reply Admin

NotHere:
ObiWayneKenobi:
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.
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.

Where do you advertise your vacancies?

2012-12-07 Reply Admin

I don't recall why, but for some reason the place had been overrun by flies.

The reason is not disposing of carcasses. Flies lay their maggots in dead flesh. Lots of flies lets you know there is lots of dead things laying about for a long time.

2012-12-12 Reply Admin

I think that to. I also think that US is great country of money, luxury and opportunities. Thankfully I live someplace else.

2013-01-09 Reply Admin

Dave Insurgent:
I've said this before elsewhere: if, in another 200 years, we're still working 40-60 hours a week trying to pay off mortgages and credit cards and people still have to choose between pain-reliving (or even life-providing) medication and nutritious food and clean water, I'd say we've failed to advance as a species. Failed miserably.

Then somehow, somewhere, we're going to have to choose a system that neither one of you like.

Because socialism Robin-Hood, and capitalism hierarchy, neither provide the world you want to see.

The only way to reach a world that benefits workers for their production equally, is under the rule of a perfect selfless leader with absolute control, because as a whole people are flawed and evil intentions always win.

2018-03-31 Reply Admin

"I have been informed that we are not allowed to let you stay in the building now that the roof has collapsed." so someone ELSE had to TELL Greg that the ROOF COLLAPSING was an ACTUAL PROBLEM?!

The Budget is Through the Roof

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