351–360 of 379 posts
I am a 25% partner of website X, which earns in the low six-figures. The 75% partner has a majority rules attitude, and all accounts and passwords, and when he decided unilaterally to take a nice salary, and then reneg on a buyout agreement, I could see things turning wrong. Having built the site (technical cofounder, translated as: free coder) I have a backend to all of the user's email addresses (10,000 or so, havi…
Six months ago I decided to quit my day time job and move to Austin. I worked in Finance and there is no way the banks let you work remotely. I had been in my position for three years and in the last one year, almost all my managers left the group. I was the only one which had knowledge about all the critical processes. I told my boss at that time that I am moving to Austin and if you really want me which you do, let…
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They wouldn't be looking at it from that angle. Probationary statuses are generally considered a bad thing in big companies, and are often used as a first step in building a case for termination. As a cog who's hoping to make a career in one of those big companies, you're expected to want to get off that bad status and back into "good worker" mode as quickly as possible. It had never occurred to anybody that they mig…
> Probationary statuses are generally considered a bad thing As someone who was almost put on a performance plan for coming to work late, you don't ever want to be put on a PP. Basically, my PP would have been documenting my arrival times for 30 days and if a fair number were out of a 5 minute tolerance range, the PP would be used as a next step for being fired. Basically, a PP is something you sign that is a contrac…
I am a developer and coming in late made little difference as I worked as many, or more, hours as everyone else. At the same time I was probably twice as productive as most of my peers. The CTO felt threatened by how easily I did my job so he wanted to bully me a bit so I wouldn't get a big head or something. He didn't expect me to suicide bomb him over it, but from my perspective I couldn't have that thing hanging over me so I handed in notice after giving it a night's sleep.
They were in a bit of trouble over it since I was a key team member and it was a big embarassment for the CTO, I even felt a little bad for him, hopefully it taught him a thing or two.
3 years in a row I won first or second place in the State Science fair, and usually about $500 to $1000 in 'scholarship' money.
The kicker was my senior year, when I won 'runner up' for a $10,000 scholarship to the college I had already been accepted to. I found the guy who won and was thrilled he was undecided about which school he was going to. I got his number and talked about the pro's and con's of that school as unbiased as possible, and later that week he called me to tell me he wasn't going. So I would then get the scholarship.
I'm pretty sure it was the Science fairs (and robot, but that's another story) that got me into college, since my high school GPA was 2.8 and I got a 410 in my verbal SAT.
At my highschool cafeteria we'd use these RFID charge cards which you could load cash into. Now, I didn't have the means to access an RFID reader to mess around with it, but turns out that there were other problems. Being the absent minded person that I am, I'd often lose these cards, pay some extra amount to get a new card, and then find the old cards in my pocket, in a bag etc. The old cards wouldn't work in the ma…
I used to work as a salaried employee for a consulting firm. I'd record my hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck. The understanding was that if ever your hours dropped below 40, you could bill an overhead number to make up for the difference, thus the fairness of not getting paid for overtime. So a year in, I only managed to find 3…
When I was a summer intern at Sun Microsystems in '87, working in building 1 in Mountain View, I turned in a time sheet with more than 8 hours on several days. HR took me aside and insisted I put down any hours of any day that I worked more than 8 hours as overtime -- at time and a half -- even if other days were less than 8. Yes, insisted! Well that got me off to a good start, and ruined me for life! Not only did I…
Apparently, it's California law that hourly employees can only work 8 hours per day, and anything over 8 hours in a 24 hours period is "overtime."
I'm now at an internship with a software company in New York, where the rules are what I consider "normal": Anything over 40 hours in a week is considered overtime, no matter when it was worked. However, the company has a strict no-overtime policy without (hard-to-get) prior approval.
For me, this meant I spent more of my time working in CA, because I was rewarded, while in NY, I work 9 hour days four days a week, then take off after lunch on Friday for a 2.5 day weekend.
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What does '"Skolka kilometer Volgograd?" will do. When they answer, nod, smile, shake their hand and say, "Speciba."' mean? I'm having no luck with online translators.
The probable reason online translators failed is interesting: davidst used nonstandard, but phonetic, transliteration. "Skolka" is closer to how it sounds but the normal way of spelling it in English is "skolko". Similarly "speciba" instead of "spasibo". Either he got these out of a traveler's manual or learned how to say them and then spelled them the way they sound. By the way, people's tendency to misspell things…
Thank you! Interesting!
Studying for an engineering dynamics final, the old "when in doubt, pick C" saying popped into my head, so I decided make a frequency plot of answers for the 4 quizzes we had that term. The prof had B as the correct answer ~50% of the time. At the end of the 2 hour final I had only finished 13 of the 20 problems, so I quickly marked B for the 7 remaining. I got the 2nd highest grade in the class, bumping my grade fro…
I spent like five minutes trying to figure out what a programming language had to do with engineering dynamics.
Flash forward a few weeks... I built a sidebar that would be active in the browser, quickly showing stats and allowing you to automate entire battles. Ah, fun times :)
(I've learned quite a lot of javascript those days, and still wish I would've used that knowledge to build something awesome. I've had multiple prototypes of AJAX-chat clients but never finished any one of them...)
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A few years later we reverse-engineered (just about) the entire economy of another on-line 'learn economy' game. You would compete with other players in a city, buying shops, selling goods, etc. A new game would start every month or so... it took two months to figure it out. First try was with excel (why on earth did we do that?). The second one was a script that would scrape the data of a few thousand people every day, then compare how their actions had resulted in a lower/higher score, etc :) We went on to more shady tactics to gain points, altering input values to buy goods cheaper than possible from the dropdown-boxes, selling them at a better margin, etc.
I once had a client that paid with a bad check. To make matters worse, the check had arrived several weeks late. Rumor had it that his business was on shaky ground. I knew something was up when the teller at my bank noticed the client's name and said they would have to verify the check (check was drawn on a different bank) And of course it was revealed there were non sufficient funds. Bad check in hand, I went to his…