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The absolute worst scenario happened

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Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#311

Post by csomar »

smnrchrds wrote: post #245
CydeWeys wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have to eat food. Food in aggregate has one of the most inelastic demand curves imaginable. If the price rises because the production costs increase, people will still buy food. They might buy different food, and you'll see a decrease in acreage given over to labor-intensive crops, but that's just the free market at work.

The thing is, if farmers in Australia increase wages and thus their product becomes more expensive, the product on supermarket shelves will not become more expensive. Rather, supermarkets will import food from another country. Food is, with few exceptions, a commodity. The producer does not set the price of the commodity, the market does. I am telling this as an engineer working in the Canada's oil and gas sector. Si…

Apples and Oranges. If you include global supply, then you have to increase salaries "globally". We all (I assume) should know that demand/supply set the price.

But imported products don't fly right into the country. There is customs, and denying/tariffing them is a policy that countries are very actively using. So at the end of the day, it's a political decision.

Edit: On the other hand, if you are exporting stuff (oil for Canada), then you can't really do that for the external market. Might explain why the government will let some sectors run with illegals (to remain competitive); the alternative being their ultimate demise.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#312

Post by SteveNuts »

throwthescene wrote: post #305
tw04 wrote: post #88

I actually don't see any issue that isn't simply a matter of money. Everything they list that's an issue seems to revolve around the fact that the employees with domain knowledge for the system have left the company. Reach out to them and hire them on as contractors. If they left under bad terms because the business was a bunch of dicks, expect to pay 10x market rate. If this is truly "fix this or the business is out…

Throwaway purely so that I can comment. I've had this happen before. Years ago I left a rather awful company - I left on great terms with my boss, though I hated the company. I was the last person who knew how to release X product. While I documented everything, after I left, the wiki lost its mind, backups apparently weren't a thing, and the director of IT moved to Bermuda. Fast forward 6 months.. a contractual obli…

What did their legal letters try to pin on you? Did they try to say you were somehow legally required to help them?

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#313

Post by colinmhayes »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #262
NewLogic wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exact same thing is happening in Australia in regards to farmers and fruit picking labour. With international borders shut they are unable to exploit foreign workers and complain that young adults are refusing to relocate for $5 an hour hard labour jobs.

Here in america farmers hire illegals to harvest crops, claiming that no american would do the work. This has always struck me as a really terrible excuse. I'm sorry, you can't simply break the law because you'd have to pay an american $20 / hr to do the work. Sure, it means that your tomatoes are more expensive, but also, now there's a hell of an incentive to apply automation to the problem yes? If you don't like th…

If farmers paid enough to get Americans to do seasonal farm labor their produce would cost twice as much as central/south American produce and they would immediately go out of business as everyone buys cheap imported fruit.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#314

Post by abxytg »

aaron-santos wrote: post #282
FireBeyond wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of years ago, a serial offender food producer was raided, multiple times. 600+ undocumented workers were found, and all spoke of management knowing their status. The workers were detained, deported, and so on. After several raids, not so much as a misdemeanor was levied against a single person, nor a fine to the company in general.

Kind of makes me think, what's the point when these laws aren't actually enforced?

The point is to punish and cause pain to the immigrants. Regardless of the original justification of a system, the point of a system is what it does or will do. That is what this system does and will do unless changed.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#315

Post by simonw »

So many beautiful details if you search for more comments by the original author of the post:

"The company that built this ERP solution went bankrupt 6 years ago, and we don't have the source code. It uses PostgreSQL and MySQL, and also has a built-in key-value database for which none of us has any credentials. We don't have the source code for this software (it's built in C and delivered to us as compiled packages..)."

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#316

Post by ghaff »

thitcanh wrote: post #270
phkahler wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was at a hotel with crappy service and asked about the problems with house keeping. The manager told me everyone in town (Traverse City MI) was trying to bring in foreigners to do housekeeping because they couldn't get local labor. They said the standard is 30 minutes per room per day. I figure at a very generous $50 per hour (100k / year) it should run $25 to have my room taken care of. Now that doesnt cover the s…

You make no sense. No one will pay $25 to clean a single room in a hotel. Just because your room is $150 it doesn’t mean that “there’s plenty to pay everyone 100k/year.

I assume the cost of a room cleaning (including costs other than direct labor) is closer to $5. That's about what hotels will often give you in some sort of funny money to skip a cleaning.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#317

Post by dghlsakjg »

playing_colours wrote: post #168
alistairSH wrote: post #89

Tangent Alert! I have a 3 months resignation period, so I can't even leave... Maybe it's my (US) American experience, but being unable to quit a job strikes me as a terrible policy. This guy(gal?) is really required to submit 3 months notice or face some sort of repercussions (financial, I assume)? Does this 3 month period apply in reverse (employer can't fire employees without a full 3 month warning)? Not that the A…

I guess US fire-at-will system should make contracting even more attractive option for good engineers: you do not get any social protection from being fired at any time unlike say Germany. One solid benefit less to justify pay difference. Is it the case?

Not quite. If you are let go "without cause", meaning they fire you for no fault of your own, you are entitled to unemployment pay from the government. In my case it was around $800/week for about 4 months while I looked for a new position. It didn't replace my salary, but it was more than enough to pay my bills.

Most large US companies also have a policy of not giving references beyond answering if the person worked there for the time claimed in the position claimed.

There are a number of benefits to full time employment that good engineers appreciate. Healthcare (in the US), known reliable income (this can be a big factor for financing a house mortgage/car), various other benefits (I get massage credit, dental, vision/glasses, acupuncture, physiotherapy). The biggest for me is just avoiding the stress of feast or famine, managing business/taxes, etc..

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#318

Post by throwthescene »

SteveNuts wrote: post #312
throwthescene wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throwaway purely so that I can comment. I've had this happen before. Years ago I left a rather awful company - I left on great terms with my boss, though I hated the company. I was the last person who knew how to release X product. While I documented everything, after I left, the wiki lost its mind, backups apparently weren't a thing, and the director of IT moved to Bermuda. Fast forward 6 months.. a contractual obli…

What did their legal letters try to pin on you? Did they try to say you were somehow legally required to help them?

The letters stated that I had a contractual obligation to assist. But I noticed at the top they were stamped 'without prejudice'. I asked my friend what that meant, and he said that technically it's not a legal letter - so I ignored them.

For a while, I made it game to light the various communications on fire in interesting ways, but it got boring.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#320

Post by Clubber »

pratik661 wrote: post #273
4e530344963049 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "firefighting" consultancy might be fun, no? And you would give people a lot of time off!

I always wondered this: If you are an external consultant (with no prior knowledge of the company's systems/processes/hierarchies) brought in to "fight" a particular fire, how do quickly get ramped up to a level of knowledge where you can analyze the root cause of/recommend a fix for a particular "fire"?

I would say the analysis is 90-99% of the work, based on my experience. Especially the more jacked up systems where cheapest devs found work on the codebase and it's a mess. 90% only comes in when it's so jacked up it requires a lot of refactoring.
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