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Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
141–150 of 250 posts
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#142Choose your own email address? It can take weeks of hassling here to get any email address set up here. I consider it a luxury to be able to receive email, clone our git repositories or connect to webservices I'm coding for. On the plus side I've got quite good at setting up ssh tunnels.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#143The monitors, I totally understand and agree with. That's about actual productivity. But choosing your own e-mail address? There must be a thousand little details like that in my life, every day, that I have no control over, like the color of my desk, or the sound of a coworker's voice. By all means, try to find a workplace that suits you the best, but if a seemingly tiny detail like that bothers you so much, unless…
May I ask how many letters there are in your last name? Mine has nine letters, and it killed me to work somewhere that my username was "mschiral" and I had to type most of it but then stop two letters early . It's like Shave and a Haircut without the "two bits".
Where I work, your username is automatically assigned in this fashion:
First letter is U or V depending on whether you are temp or perm employee. Next 4 letters are first 4 of last name. Final two letters are first 2 of first name.
I'm vmamema
Nice to meet you
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#144Want to know if a company has good engineering culture? Look up the company's engineers' facebook and twitter feeds and see what they're saying. Engineers who are happy tell everyone about it. Big monitors and choosing your email addresses are great; for a couple of weeks. Then after the big monitor honeymoon phase is over and the daily slog begins, the engineers realize that they have a big monitor that buries them…
The theory behind "2 monitors" is that companies that allow 2 monitors aren't the sort of places which have lots of soul crushing work. It's a proxy for a good company.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#145For the engineers I've hired onto my team, I insist they be provided the very things that I want as an engineer: - Two big monitors - New dev machine/laptop, running latest bits - A top-of-the-line chair - Some natural light (not to be confused with *natty light*) These are the non-negotiable items, and having taken a few senior mgmt positions, it's now something I state upfront: this is how we roll, no exceptions. T…
Big monitors, small offices. Give me a room where I can close the door. I'll share it with one other person, but it can't be a tight fit. If you expect me to work while you're interrupting me every 5 minutes, then you don't really expect me to be productive. Also good- conference rooms for ad hoc meetings. (Maybe for the people who like to work together in a room they can take over a conference room or whatever.... m…
One of my summer jobs needed a lot of stapling. Everything I did ended up being stapled to something else.
The stapler broke. A nice stapler costs just £10. It will last, with care, ten years.
I ask for a stapler. I get given a nasty plastic[1] bit of rubbish. It breaks after half a day. I use my minimum wage to buy myself a stapler.
I learn to hate that employer.
[1] the plastic was nasty - that translucent coloured plastic popular when iMacs appeared.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#146 [detached]
melissa@tellus$ whoami
melissa
Last login: Fri May 18 09:29:53 on ttys002
MelBook:~ melissa$ whoami
melissa
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been posting my e-mail addresses in plaintext all over the web for a good decade and a half. I still use those same addresses. I see no spam. Spam filters work. Why are people afraid of having their e-mail address out there without obfuscation?
Back when Usenet and mailing lists were the medium for most of the important conversations on the internet (that is, before 1994 or 1995) if you tried to post to Usenet or a mailing list with an obfuscated email address, people would complain (in replies to your post) if the admins running Usenet or the mailing list let your post through at all.
This was enforced with various levels of strictness.
DE usenet is still pretty strict about not allowed munged email addresses, and only allowing you to use an address that you have control of.
Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers, but insist on empty or real Reply-to headers. (Reply to wasn't returned in a simple header retrieval, meaning it wasn't as often scraped. And it was optional. So either have it real, or don't have it at all.) Other bits didn't care what you did.
Since poorly munged email addresses could cause considerable amounts of spam to be sent to that address it's fair enough to remind people not to inadvertently use another person's real email address.
email filters then were not great; email addresses were scraped; downloading a lot of headers over lousy dial-up was annoying; and huge mailboxes was rare.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#148For the engineers I've hired onto my team, I insist they be provided the very things that I want as an engineer: - Two big monitors - New dev machine/laptop, running latest bits - A top-of-the-line chair - Some natural light (not to be confused with *natty light*) These are the non-negotiable items, and having taken a few senior mgmt positions, it's now something I state upfront: this is how we roll, no exceptions. T…
Big monitors, small offices. Give me a room where I can close the door. I'll share it with one other person, but it can't be a tight fit. If you expect me to work while you're interrupting me every 5 minutes, then you don't really expect me to be productive. Also good- conference rooms for ad hoc meetings. (Maybe for the people who like to work together in a room they can take over a conference room or whatever.... m…
I don't get this new obsession with "let's just put everyone in a giant room so they can collaborate". I think it's a cop-out to not get bigger/better laid out offices.
Developers need to write code either alone or in pairs. Large places breed interruptions, killing productivity. All these experimental ideas with unassigned offices where anyone uses them when they need to don't work either because people will simply squat on them.
If you want your developers to do actual work instead of being distracted, give them individual offices + lots of shared meeting space with whiteboards. This is the gold standard. Anything less (e.g.: n developers per office) will reduce productivity.
Here's my formula:
productivity = hours_per_week * total_developers * (baseline + (1-baseline)/(avg_developers_per_office^ALPHA))
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#149I think the meta-point sort of makes sense. Places that don't skimp on resources which are a comparatively small fraction of salary (monitors, fancy coffee makers, catered food, etc...) are more likely to value their employees. That said: I use a single 15.6" laptop on a stand (or, of course, in my lap) for pretty much everything I do. I find the added productivity of always having everything I work on in front of me…
Being allowed to use the laptop that you prefer is a good thing, no?
A bad PHB would happily force you to stop using the laptop and start using the clunky PC with an OS that's slightly tweaked away from what you're familiar[1] with and without allowing you to tweak it back; with some really annoying software that loads on boot that you're not allowed to turn off; and with some stupid seemingly trivial but not at all trivial fault (sticky 'y' key - "It's okay, just type it harder") that'll never get fixed.
But hey, you've got a big monitor now, so why isn't the work done yet?
[1] Left handed mouse settings, for example.
Re: Why Quit? Because the other company has bigger monitors.
#150For the engineers I've hired onto my team, I insist they be provided the very things that I want as an engineer: - Two big monitors - New dev machine/laptop, running latest bits - A top-of-the-line chair - Some natural light (not to be confused with *natty light*) These are the non-negotiable items, and having taken a few senior mgmt positions, it's now something I state upfront: this is how we roll, no exceptions. T…
I want to work with you.
I've currently got a ~4' whiteboard, a ~13" laptop with a ~15" 4:3 monitor attached to it in my cube.
Takes some getting used to compared to the IdeaPaint-covered WALL at my home office and the two 24" widescreens.