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The absolute worst scenario happened

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Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#471

Post by Animats »

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…

About half of US hired farmworkers are illegal immigrants, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture.[1] It was only 12% in 1991, but passed 50% by 2000.

[1] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#472

Post by Graffur »

hinkley wrote: post #460
blhack wrote: post #375

It's dark, but I kindof love situations like this (although luckily I haven't had something like this happen to me in digital space since I was a teenager). Some places I would look: 1) Are you SURE that everything is actually gone? Is there a logfile, a billing trail, sent emails trail from your email provider, something like that? If it was me I'd be looking for a secondary system (like alerts, logfiles, billing, e…

Start connecting with everyone on LinkedIn for one...

That's actually a very good idea. Even the people not on there might be connected through other platforms whatsapp etc so could be contacted

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#473

Post by Symbiote »

foobiekr wrote: post #444
ACS_Solver wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, I agree. But 3 months seems crazy to me. If I have an open position and it isn't filled in ~4-6 weeks, it often gets given to some other team (on the basis that if I really needed that position filled, I'd do so). I can't plan hiring over that timeframe. If you're in a culture (locality + industry) where a position can be filled in 4 weeks, that's one thing. If you're in a culture where every experienced person…

Assuming that you’re talking about senior people, who are all employed, I don’t see how this helps. Realistically employee X resigns, and we find a replacement; that replacement is working and needs to resign. Their end dates are still serialized. We have a bunch of employees in Europe and everyone involved except the very marginal employees sees this situation as strongly negative (and, in fact, an argument to not h…

Are those Europeans who don't value their rights fairly young?

I don't need my 3 months now. They might be useful if my employer axes a whole department. They're useful for people with family commitments giving them less mobility.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#474

Post by pjmanroe »

I worked for a newspaper group back in the 1990s. I did all their programming in dBase III & IV LAN. I was putting in 80+ hours a week. I wasn't getting paid squat, but then they wanted to put me on salary (at less than I was currently making) and I said no way I'd give my notice first. So that's what I ended up doing.

They didn't believe me. But I left. After a few months of haggling I went back at $50 an hour on contract. I did this for a few weeks (about 25 hours a week), then started to not want to pay me. So I quit for good. Unless they made an upfront deposit. Which they wouldn't do.

They ended up spending close to $250,000 on equipment and programmers and still couldn't do what I could. They were duplicating and tripling everything. Wasted so much money. Now I'm going to college for my BS in Computer Science with a specialty in Software Engineering. I'm currently running Windows 10 Pro Insiders Edition DEV and VMware with Kali Linux.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#475

Post by twobitshifter »

foobiekr wrote: post #433
rantwasp wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

nah. documentation only goes so far. you handle this by having and exercising a disaster recovery plan and having (and listening to) competent people that would spot this issue in a jiffy.

This. I actually think just documentation is, well not completely worthless but close to. Imagine telling someone they could learn to weld airframes by reading. Just no.

For software, it’s the maintenance task that’s helped by documentation not building. They still need to know how to build but it’s a lot easier with documentation. I know that when we use software packages we all rely on the documentation to understand how to use it and code our desired behaviors. It’s obvious that our own code can benefit from documentation in the same way.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#476

Post by [deleted] »

dghlsakjg wrote: post #317
playing_colours wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#477

Post by alistairSH »

ghaff wrote: post #216
playing_colours wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes and no. First of all, you get benefits as a full-time employee that contractors don't get, like healthcare, disability insurance, and paid time off. (This all mostly boils down to money of course.) Probably more importantly, yes, a company can in general simply tell you your services are no longer needed one morning. However, in reality, absent either company downsizing or a documented performance issue, that is…

Health-care and other benefits would be priced into any contractor's fees. IE, for a full-time job that paid $100k + benefits, you'd need ~$160k on contract to make up for the additional taxes, self-paid benefits, etc.

Looking at peers who struck out on their own, you can make good money as a contractor, but you typically need to be top of your profession and able to command massive fees. And like any business owner, the pressure to always have too much work usually ruins any chance at using the money for longer, more extravagant vacations.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#478

Post by Nextgrid »

Mauricebranagh wrote: post #401
Nextgrid wrote: post #3

This doesn’t sound that bad. Unless I’m misunderstanding something, the ERP was used as a source of truth for DNS records, and that mechanism broke. There’s no indication of actual data loss so it should still be in the ERP DB, and it’s a matter of reverse-engineering how it was all put together and then extract the data into a zone file (or into a managed DNS service such as Route 53) at least for the core domains w…

I did something similar for a customer of ours who was a major UK cinema chain - they had had a falling out with some small company that had built an online booking system. Highlights: 1 Bookings where made at individual cinemas 2 The network was a packet radio system that blocked :-) only Transaction could be in flight (Leicester square had two channels) 3 Core of system was Perl running on three windows NT machines…

I'd love to read a detailed write-up about this. Why packet radio - what was the real-time requirement and why couldn't it be fulfilled by an internet connection (I understand internet was primitive back then, but ISDN should've been able to give you enough bandwidth?).

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#479

Post by flukus »

giantrobot wrote: post #301
ISL wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or rather, how does one avoid getting into this situation. Documentation?

The issue with "documentation" is there are never enough resources devoted to it at most companies. When given a schedule it only covers the main project goal(s) and no time for documentation or refactoring or any quality of life improvements. Significant documentation is also not something easily written in slack time. With any non-trivial project good documentation is a full time effort. It also needs to be updated…

It doesn't help that "Technical Writer" is now an incredibly rare job title, it was one of the first in a long line of specializations that were pushed on to general developers. As you mentioned, they were never allocated the extra time but also don't have the training and experience that technical writers once did. It was also a very poor target for outsourcing.

The specializations common on a team even 20 years ago was much closure to the "Surgical Team" model from the mythical man month than what we have today.

Re: The absolute worst scenario happened

#480

Post by hharlequin »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #341
Judgmentality wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Funnily enough it made me sick to my stomach. That an overworked employee who had already left the company would stick up for himself? Or that a company would go to such efforts to try to manipulate a former employee? I realize my tone doesn't hide my feelings, but even if we disagree I'd still be curious to hear more.

Consider that you are only hearing one side of the story and taking it entirely at face value.

I think enough of us have been on the same side of this story that we feel fairly comfortable taking it at face value, even if we're only applying it to said personal experience in a wishful fashion.
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