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Obviously.
Because his posts here, just like everybody else's on all internet entertainment sites, are chock full of wholesome scientific rigor. Just as I'm sure every one of your posts is. Truthishly.
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Q: How many men does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. Bitch can cook in the dark.
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OFFS you come out with this shit but you haven't got the fucking brains to quote at least one of these sexist jokes. Of of course, you're a split-arse and ain't got no fucking brains.
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Yeah like I post with "Most" and make a crap statement? Fuck you, you cunt.
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It seems like Alex has too much time on his hands. Or did I miss a plethora of easter eggs in all these past articles?
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Easter eggs? You mean when you click at random on the text in the article and a unicorn pops up?
Sure. Go back and try.
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I was around hot girls once, and I can assure you that "Cream rises to the top" is no laughing matter !
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Been there done that. The management team employed some guy to ensure the programmers did what they were supposed to, he was not a programmer.
First rule we had to fill in diaries, stating what we did every 15 minutes. It lasted a week, then I started writing mine in hex, the other programmers followed and within a week the guy was gone.
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Everything I ever post is based on personal past experiences. At every company I've worked at where the CEO has developed the initial version of the software, two things have always been true:
The original version was in some amateurish language e.g. Foxpro, Access, etc. and the CEO taught himself how to use it
The CEO ruled with an iron fist and had his hands in all technical decisions even when he had no idea of modern development practices, rather than hiring experienced managers (or promoting quality people from within) and focusing at a purely high-level overview.
Methinks this Matt Westwood character has a beef with me as he seems to follow my posts and post pottymouthing and rude replies.
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I for one welcome our new Nagesh overlords.
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Guys, I have some terrible news. I can't get into the details now, but Alex has suddenly and unexpectedly passed. Mark and I will hash this out over the weekend and decide if dissolution of this site is the right answer.
Pray for Alex's family, please.
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Oh good grief, again? Send in the Igors. Again.
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You have any idea how expensive Mil Std paperclips are ?
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Seems he has a beef with a lot of folks. Doesn't handle it well when someone disagrees with him. Methinks he's, gasp, a troll.
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I prefer the Nageshen to this Westwood fgt.
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Meh. They can all go bugger each other to death for all I care.
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Is it ironic that next to this article is an ad for "BuildMaster, Your New Deployment Overlord"..?
Is that Stephan in a goofy costume portrayed in the ad?
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Great plan! So now you have no job and if you try to use this job as a reference they'll tell them how you were insubordinate, unable to get along with co-workers, and broke your employment agreement by leaving without notice.
Those of us who are not living in our parents' basement and don't have a trust fund to fall back on can't just quit a job without having some plan in place for how we're going to continue to pay the bills.
You might want to be careful about burning that bridge. You may need it to live under in your cardboard box.
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Really? When someone tells me about a disagreement he had with another person, he almost always describes it as he was 100% right and the other person was 100% wrong. And I always take this with a grain of salt. Maybe it's true. But maybe if I heard the other person's side, it would give a very different impression.
Here's one rule of thumb I've figured out: If someone says that three of his four previous bosses were pretty good and one was an idiot, I'll probably believe him. If he says that every job he's ever had the boss was an idiot, it may be that he's just been very unlucky. But more likely the problem is him.
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I'm reminded of the job where we got a memo stating:
(1) Timesheets must be completed and submitted each week.
(2) Timesheets must show hours actually worked. Therefore, you cannot fill out your timesheet in advance, you must fill it out only after completing the work.
(3) Timesheets for the week must be turned in by noon on Friday.
I asked the seemingly obvious question: If we cannot fill out timesheets in advance, how can I turn in a timesheet at noon on Friday that includes hours for Friday afternoon, hours that I haven't worked yet?
The boss replied by explaining that HR needs the timesheets by noon so that they can get them entered into the system in time for payroll, etc etc. i.e. no answer to the question.
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Why in the world would he do that?
Right, because the only two options are "Trust fund baby living with Mommy," and "Barely scraping by paycheck to paycheck." It's completely impossible for anyone to have some modest savings to use for a cushion and a well-founded expectation of being finding a new job quickly. And it's completely impossible that this situation is what Obi was envisioning when he made his comment.
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I don't know what country or state you live in but where I am there's no such thing as an employee agreement that entails working x time before leaving. Two week notice is a courtesy to wrap up any projects remaining, not an obligation. If a place was particularly loathsome I'd give a day's notice, if not "effective immediately"; if they were tolerable I'd give at least one week, and if they were decent but had fundamental issues they get the normal two weeks. But it's always a courtesy, not an expectation. Just as they can call me into the conference room one day and terminate me immediately without any warning or prior notice, I can quit without warning or notice.
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The relationship is severed when management discovers the compact has been severed. Employee success is measured in accomplishing employee goals while giving the appearance of accomplishing company goals. Employees should employ deception as necessary.
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Firstly, if somebody else is offering to take care of all the merging, that's great! Merging is boring.
Sometimes it's worth sacrificing a little optimality for the purposes of consistency. If cursors are usually slower, it may be simpler to never use them.
Presumably the project managers were trying to capture real hours worked while encouraging people to avoid overtime. Seems reasonable, and Miguel appears to have behaved passive-agressively, which is common in second-rate "also-ran" nerds.
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Yep, it's a courtesy. My last job got so annoying, I gave my 2 weeks notice before even finding a new job. They complained about me having to finish my project, so I told them it wouldn't happen. After the first week of my notice, I decided to take off on Friday. Going into work the next monday, i found my key access had been revoked, they took my computer, and told HR that I was fired for job abandonment. Talk about courtesy. I thought it was hilarious, and my next employer didn't care at all.
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Scenarios like that are always funny, because if you've given notice who cares if the company "fires" you? Pretty much once you give notice if they don't tell you to leave immediately, you can do what you like - take long lunches, extra breaks, miss days, because really you already said you are quitting, so what can they do? Legally all they can say is that you worked x amount of time and they would not hire you again, but it's opening up to a lawsuit if they start talking shit about you.
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Except of course that during that notice period, you are still an employee and they still have a reasonable expectation that you will produce. If you don't (including if you take a vacation day without proper approval according to the company's policy), you should expect to be summarily canned.
If you don't care about the money, that's fine, but you're burning bridge that you presumably didn't want to burn, given that you did them the courtesy of giving notice. Why bother giving notice in the first place if that's what you're going to do?
IMHO, giving notice and then cocking off is worse than walking out with no notice. At least if you simply walk, you have made the clear and honest choice that, "Employer and I have no common ground and there's no point in continuing," vs. "I'm going to be a petty, lying, immature little dick and milk Employer for all I can while giving the false impression that I am still contributing."
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Yep, my employer is exactly like that. Last year we had compulsory ethics training, for which no jobcode was provided. The irony hurt.
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In one place upper management demanded the previous weeks project billing details by 9AM every Monday morning. Of course nothing was ever collated until around Thursday so the solution was to instruct everyone to fill in their billing details ONE WEEK AHEAD OF TIME. Such a practice was in place for at least a year and generated huge amounts of interdepartmental hostility, especially since every section was supposed to be a profit centre from internal billing.
The guy in charge of all that mess later went on to be in charge of an electricity authority that entirely blacked out the biggest city in New Zealand for a couple of weeks due to cutting back on maintainance.
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By billing details I mean timesheets billed to projects. It wasn't the sort of place where tasks could actually be planned a week ahead either because it was a support area that was supposed to have a faster turnaround than that.
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I think he swapped the good and bad news.
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In the UK the notice period tends to be a contractual requirement, and in most professional positions this tends to be one month or, for positions with more responsibility, three months. This serves our professional community well, and exists to safeguard the interests of both employer and employee.
In extreme cases where it is apparent that no benefit will accrue to either party by insisting that this obligation be adhered to, personnel are frequently allowed to depart without notice being worked, sometimes on full pay. It all depends on circumstance.
As I say, these practices seem to work in the UK. One is generally expected not to commit the acts of vandalism and sabotage which certain irresponsible contributors to this forum advocate through a combination of malice, offended dignity and sheer delight in morally-justified evil. And, I repeat, if one does deliberately commit such acts, they are likely to be brought to justice.
I sigh with despair when I read about the business concerns that cause the appalling bad feeling discussed here, most of which appear to emerge from the US market (although I may be wrong), and conclude that either American software engineers are in general a bunch of clowns, or that the business enterprises for which they work are what we brits refer to as cowboy outfits. Having worked at an instance of one with a bunch of the others, I express no surprise that their once proud nation seems to be falling down around their sorry ears.
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I did an internship with a government contractor that had a phone-based timesheet system. The routine went like this: every day at 4:30, everyone start calling the 800 number.
After 10-15 minutes of busy signals, you would then proceed to enter hours spent on each project using the asterisk as a decimal point (6-minute increments) along with the 5-6 digit project code for everything you did throughout the day. All billable projects and "overhead" (meetings, breaks, vacation, sick leave, timesheet reporting, etc.) each had a project code to be entered.
After each entry, the voice system would pause for 15 seconds to think about what you typed. After entering in your entire day, if the total was not 40.0 hours a pleasant voice would spend 30 seconds explaining the importance of accurate record keeping before inviting you to start over.
Good times.
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You didn't believe them when they told you it was to measure how long things are taking, did you?
Even if you're salaried, at many places if you're not putting in 10-20 hours of unpaid overtime a week you're "just not working out" and need to "show the company you're dedicated to success"
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Good points, except for the exit interview. That's your last chance to leave on a good note, so don't screw it up by being critical on your way out the door. And because the interview is being conducted by HR, you can be sure those notes will be in your employment file.
The fact you're even at an exit interview means that it's too late to salvage the workplace for you. Anything negative you say will not fix anything for you. You also no longer owe them any of your time. So be cordial, take your final check, and keep it under 10 minutes. Rant all you like on the drive home, but it's all smiles and handshakes in the exit interview.
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If you are really confidant that you can get another job in a few weeks, why not get the job first and then quit? Is this job really so intolerable that you can't put up with it for another couple of weeks, just to be safe? What if you THINK you can get another job quickly, but when you start looking you find that the job market is much worse than you thought? You might end up having to accept a job that sucks worse than the one you just left, or maybe even finding that you can't find any job at all before you exhause your "modest savings".
In practice, I've always found that getting a new job is very unpredictable. I've had times that I've looked for months without finding anything, times when I found a job within a few weeks, and once I called a head hunter in the morning, they set up an interview that afternoon, and I had a job offer by the end of the day.
I'm not "living paycheck to paycheck", I have about three month's pay in cash and liquid investments, plus a retirement fund. But I'd much rather keep the income coming in and keep those assets in case of an emergency truly outside my control, rather than burn though it just so ... what? I can have the satisfaction of telling my boss where to go? If it takes you a month to find a job, is that satisfaction really worth losing a month's pay?
Are there a lot of people who feel this way? If I ever own a company, maybe I should have a standing policy that any employee can come in and yell and swear at me for half an hour with an absolute guarantee of no reprisals for $2,000. (I assume most programmers make more than $2,000 a month.) If lots of people feel the way you do, I could make a lot of money with that.
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I'd have to check the details, but many if not most jobs I've had, there's been an offer letter that gives some very basic terms of employment, usually including that if the company lays me off, they'll give me two weeks severance pay, and if I quit, I must give two weeks notice.
I'm not a lawyer; I don't know if such conditions are enforcable in court. I would think they are: it's in writing, and I indicated my acceptance by taking the job. I would think that qualifies as a "contract".
In any case, it's a gentlemen's agreement, and unless the company has failed to live up to their side of the bargain -- not "I don't like the policies here", but "they didn't pay me" or some such -- I would feel bound by it.
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Maybe the current job sucks SO HARD that one doesn't want to hang around for the extra one day to few weeks it may take to get another.
I thought that it was obvious that that was a fundamental premise of this hypothetical job that led the discussion to this subthread in the first place.
So, yes, it is. If it weren't, we wouldn't be having this debate.
By that reasoning, nobody should ever quit any job without another already lined up that they are 100% sure will be better, and if you carry it to it's logical conclusion, everyone should at all times be looking for another job just in case the current one ends tomorrow. And nobody should ever start a new business, because you can't predict whether it will become profitable before your funding runs out.
But in the real world, people can make reasonable guesses about how long it might take them to land a job, and can make reasonable estimates of how long they can live on their current savings, and can factor in a margin of safety, and can weigh those risks against the benefits of not having to spend one more day in their current hellhole, and can make an informed decision as to what's best for them.
Of course, they could be wrong, and they may not find a new job, or their new job may suck worse than the current one (but that risk exists even if they land the job before quitting). There are always risks, but we weigh them and make the best decision we can.
Didn't say you were. Your post, however, implied the false dichotomy of that or trust-fund-baby.
That's fine, and that's your choice. That doesn't mean that it's the right choice for everybody in a similar situation. Maybe for somebody else, yes, it IS worth diving into that savings to be able to leave an intolerable situation.
I don't know. I once had a summer job in college that I quit on the spot about an hour after coming into work one day about 2 weeks before I was scheduled to be done. It was really tough not having that money, but it was worth it to avoid the soul-crushing hell that was that job.
In my adult professional life, however, I've never had a job that was so horrible that I couldn't stand two more weeks of it, although another poster's comment above about 1-3 months in the UK might have made me make a different decision in one case. I can imagine that SOME people might experience that, and might be willing to accept the risk of being jobless for the ability to end severe pain right now.