[issues] Re: modesty?
I am an intern at a small (<40 employees) web apps development consulting company. One of the interns is in the formative stages of becoming that guy who insists dismanteling his power supply worked to fix the screen resolution at home. He's also picked up this SensitiveNewAgeGuy habit of being openly introspective about his development with his coworkers. Once every few weeks he anounces some major breakthrough in How He Should Live His Life. (Such as: "I should make sure I'll have enough money to pay my rent before I get an advance at work to buy bongos." or "Buying groceries is way cheaper than eating takeout every meal." and "I will never pay off my $5000 credit card debit if I only make the minimum payment.") In any case, yesterday he announced that he had learned Three Things from working here. 1) Never admit you don't know something. (If you do, the people who know it will get the new exciting assignment, and you'll be stuck doing the same old crap you've been doing all year.) 2) Never admit when you've made a mistake. (It makes people think you are unreliable, dumb, or both, and then you surely won't get the new interesting assignments.) 3) Never give your problems to other people to solve. (Once they see you've been going about the problem all wrong for days, they will think you are dumb and not give you good assignments.) [The third point is interesting because most of our interns are part time, and most of our assignments have 1-2 day deadlines. If a part time intern doesn't finish his assignment while he's here, he *has* to give it to someone who will be in the next day, or we won't make the deadline.] This kid is such a trip... The one guy who I work with all the time is a perfectly cool guy, and a great programmer. He's got no problem asking me to look at his code when he gets stuck, and I ask the same of him. But this other crazy kid refuses to ask for help. He'll spend all day stuck on a problem, then bitch the next day that once he noticed such-and-such it was easy, but someone hid it in the code. (90% of the time, the code is marked correctly with the writer, and the writer is sitting in the same room as him.) It really is an interesting look at where these ideas form... Disturbing, but interesting. Thankfully our management and senior programming staff is good enough to know that good programmers ask for help and don't pretend to know everything. The senior coder I work with asks interviewees questions like "I see you've got alot of experience with . How would you do in ?" to see if they'll answer "I wouldn't to it in that language" or if they will give a long convoluted explanation of how you could do it. He'll also ask (for example) Java programmers about stuff that is totally not on their resume (FoxPro, for example) to see if they'll try to bullshit him. Definately the kind of guy I get along with. --Alison A Kozic| Tell a man there are 300,000,000,000 stars ICQ 97567379 | in the universe and he will believe you. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | Tell him a bench has wet paint on it and [EMAIL PROTECTED] | he'll have to touch it to be sure. ___ issues mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/issues
Re: [issues] Conversation monopolization
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: > We BOTH hated it. Then we found out that he was assuming I'd interrupt > him if I had something to say, and *I* was assuming that he'd leave me > space to speak in. When my SO & I were starting out, I'd get so bored because I never had a chance to speak during any heated discussion. I'm from a very mellow, non-confrontational family, and never learned how to interupt. So I learned. > The balance has become pretty good - we have a good group of mixed- > gender people Judging by a comment on the Sphere list regarding the amount of crossover between Sphere and LinuxChix, we probably do have a good group of mixed-gender people... as well as plenty of women and men. But I don't think that's what you meant. ^_^ --A ----- A Kozic| The way you live without gender is you [EMAIL PROTECTED] | look for where gender is, and then you [EMAIL PROTECTED] | go someplace else. --Kate Bornstein ___ issues mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/issues
Re: [issues] Re: [techtalk] Sick of surf and porn addicts
On Thu, 31 May 2001 James Sutherland <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Yep. Your employer is paying you to do a job. As long as you do that job > properly, without breaking the law etc, they can't complain - and > monitoring behaviour not directly related to your performance is BAD. > Ultimately, that's what you're paid for: not to spend X hours/day doing > something work-related, but to keep those servers running to the best of > your ability (or whatever). It doesn't matter if they spend twice as long > on coffee breaks as other staff - all that matters is "do they do the > job?". Maybe I should be more greatful for my job. I've always thought my employer was a little more laid back than most, but apparently he's well outside the norm. Do get the demographics straight, I work for a consulting company in the US (the employer is Canadian). He fully recognizes that employees need slack time. Last staff meeting he said "We always need to find the best use of our time. Sometimes the best use will be pingpong. We all need time to recharge." We're "required" to take an hour for lunch, although no one complains if you don't. If you work substantial overtime one night, you are expected to show up late the next morning. As for our computer usage, we are asked not to run "instant messaging" programs (a firewall concern?), and I just found out we aren't supposed to listen to streaming radio broadcasts, but no one takes that rule seriously. There is a line in the employee handbook that says net access may be monitored, but if they did, I'm sure I would have gotten in trouble by now. Or maybe they monitor it, but don't care what you do so long as you aren't selling company secrets and so forth. I need a certain amount of slacking to be productive for the rest of the time. I'm thrilled that I can do this without worrying that some management shmuck is going to get pissed. Hell, I can download a new distro and have the junior sys admin burn it onto cd for me. (We are a 100% windows office, so this isn't remotely work related.) Maybe they just realize that happy coders are a hell of alot more productive and creative than bored coders. I can't see porn as justification for monitoring. If they were downloading and sending massive photos of their nephews and cats and so forth that is the same problem. If someone's computer is having problems because of the massive amounts of porn on it, can't you tell them "Hey, could you clear up some space on the hard drive?" If they are playing quake all day, someone is sure to notice. People have been slacking off at work /long/ before the advent of the internet. I don't recall if it has been covered, but can you compile usage statistics for each user legally? Or not even individually. Just to say to management "This percentage of the bandwidth is used by employees. This is how much we need to sustain our business functions without employee net access. Since we use so much for employee net access, we may need to upgrade X, Y & Z to ensure reliable functioning of our business functions." If it really causing tech problems, you can probably quantify it in a way management will care about. -- Avery "Those who would sacrifice freedom for security deserve neither freedom, nor security." --Benjamin Franklin ___ issues mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/issues
