171–180 of 250 posts
Just a thought I'm not sure I actually believe myself: Does catering to every trivial whim (email address? really?) of your employees create a culture of entitled whiners? I've never worked at such a place, so I wouldn't know.
Yes. But what's the point of spending all that money on employees if they aren't 100% happy?
If someone's complaining about the size of a monitor as a reason for leaving then there's a good chance that it isn't the monitors! People don't like burning bridges when they leave a job, so they are highly unlikely to say the real reason - especially when the person that's asking for the reason is the actual problem.
Best Buy is selling 27" monitors for about $300 and 30" monitors for about $1,500. As a percentage of a full-time developer’s salary, depreciated over three years, $600 is pocket change and even $3,000 is defensible. So if a company is nickel-and-diming its developers over this kind of thing, what does that say about the overall attitude of the management?
For 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.
Don't do it. Paint your wall white, or whatever, and get a big sheet of glass (or a few). Mount that sucker on the wall.
Glass doesn't suck up color the way whiteboards do, and it's easy as hell to clean. It's also cheap as all get out - it's a big sheet of sand, after all. And you can do nifty things - arduino, RGB LED, mild paper backing, and you've got a damn mood-light / whiteboard :)
Anyway, I recommend this to everyone I know that talks about this. A company we sub for in VA did this because I was in town when they were planning the whiteboards for their new office, and they love it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
>Other bits of Usenet would tolerate carefully munged From headers before 1994?
Valuing an employee's time is definitely something that should be considered. But even taken a few steps further than "I need another monitor to increase productivity", and you're floating dangerously close to self-entitlement, and simple, pathetic whining. At Yahoo, I distinctly remember a thread on devel-random where one employee, in a single post, complained about things like how ugly the color scheme of the walls…
I'm an owner / CTO of a consultancy, and this point always frustrates me. We are only 12 or so employees, and we're all very comfortable with one another (we'll have game nights at the office, watch the GSL, etc). Still, when me and my partner have a 1:1 or talk to the employees, about 80% of them will not tell us their concerns or things they need.
It's a huge problem for us - we are very interested in spending our money on benefits, etc. that people care about, rather than just guessing, but it's virtually impossible to do this. Story time:
We had a designer leave recently (I We have since modified our health insurance to be just fantastically good, because apparently this was a concern (and we've had to forego a few other things in order to be able to afford it). But the point is, this is a guy that I was friends with, and he just would not tell me what weight to give the health insurance benefit vector.
It's maddening because I'm a very data-driven guy, and for whatever reason I can't get good data on employee concerns to save my life. Does anyone have any pointers here?
At my place, you get name.surname@mycompany.com and can have as many aliases as you want, I don't care - I'll always send you mail to name.surname@mycompany.com. How is it NOT geeky to have local mail parts in friggin' order? Also, even if I had money to provide some hardware to people working for me, I'd call them whining b....s they are. We'll organically upgrade on neccesity and keep it lean at all times.
There are a lot of clueless companies and managers out there.
My wife interviewed with a company that was trying to hire a developer to commercialize their in house printing software. The hiring manager was surprised that developers aren't interested in working in a place with NO vacation the first year. He was also surprised that she was used to coming in and leaving at something besides 8:30 to 5:00 or (gasp!) leave the building for lunch at her previous job. I don't think the manager was a bad guy, just clueless.
The manager who calls his reports "whining..b" and would make them less productive to save a few bucks probably won't realize why he has a high churn rate or why candidates give his company a pass after the interview.
For 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…
The only ones who got dual monitors were management and HR. One of our developers wanted two monitors - he was told to go buy them himself, so he did.
Whiteboard? More frequent is post-it notes.
Current development equipment - Was doing kernel development in 2003 on Pentium 75s.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
congrats, you found the most effective way to ensure that you only hire candidates who couldn't get on at more enjoyable places to work.
No, I attract hard working, no nonsense people who take joy in getting things done with least amount of friction, and who don't need masseuse to write code.
Monitors are nice indeed, but the one infrastructure item that would get me to turn down a job offer is Lotus Notes. I depend entirely too much on email to be able to do my job to saddle myself with that piece of junk. Using Notes is like trying to run a marathon with snowshoes on.
omg - does that still exist?