201–210 of 250 posts
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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.
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…
> It also sounds like the boss didn't bother asking the employee at their 1:1's about what they thought needed changing, or maybe he was just unapproachable. 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…
One thing I've noticed being an employee is that when employers try to get feedback in how to compensate their employees or what kind of perks they can additionally offer the question asked is usually, "Is there anything I can do to make you happy?" That question is vague and oftentimes sounds like it should be answered in the negative. The employee doesn't want to look needy of course. Instead, the employer should ask, "Hey, are you happy with your hardware? You've been messing a lot with databases lately. Do you have enough RAM? Do you want some extra disks to mess with different RAIDs or filesystems?" or maybe, "Do you think we should get developers a second monitor? I really don't mind spending the money, it just never occured to me until now that it might be useful." Once an employer actually opens up a dialogue with an explicit offer or idea, the feedback the employer wants to hear will much more likely flow naturally.
More specifically with a topic such as health insurance, I as an employee need to be given some idea of what options are on the table when it comes to "improving" my health insurance plan. Are we talking about the employer paying more of the insurance or perhaps am I concerned about the lack of a plan that offers an unlimited lifetime benefits clause.
I feel my job as an employee is to do work that adds value to the company. If the company wants to genuinely add value to my well-being, but wants it to be more thoughtful or mutually beneficial than a raise, the ball's in their court to be creative and come up with a list of starter ideas. Now I'm not averse to thinking of what would be useful, but a vague email, or even a 1 on 1 asking me what can be improved is unfortunately not going to get any feedback because my mind really won't turn its attention to thinking about that for the time necessary. A personal anecdote offered in lesson form:
A CEO of a startup may hold a discussion on company offered stock options, to fill in people on how it works on a compensation level. When questions come up that the CEO does not feel comfortable answering (considering he's not a certified accountant), a normal CEO will advise you to ask an accountant (accountant? I'm 22 years old, I don't have an accountant, should I take off work hours to find an accountant, go to an accountant and ask him/her?). A creative CEO will get an accountant in the office for a day and schedule those with questions to have a 1 on 1 meeting.
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I have a whiteboard wall at my office. Let me make a recommendation. 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'…
Actual "glass whiteboards" are tremendously expensive - we're talking thousands of dollars. They seem really slick. Are you doing a DIY sort of thing, like this: http://www.ikeahackers.net/2012/01/not-expensive-glass-white...
We have a bunch of Ikea glass-top desks, which at first I thought would be lousy. Turns out the glass is far better on your skin than the various other finishes of wood-type desks (the ones from Ikea).
But, huge side benefit -- people are writing notes, designs, etc. all over their desks. It's very cool.
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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…
We have a combination of open environment + offices now, with several people sharing offices. Privacy quite often leads to productivity, but I've found it ebbs and flows with people over time. Sometimes a few folks need to be out in the atrium or in the common area, it just really depends. No judgment from us, if they want to crawl in the vent and work, get to climbing!
We always try to make sure we can accommodate most everyone's wishes for workspaces.
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omg - does that still exist?
I worked tech support last year and yes, there is still a small percentage of people that use Notes in their daily work. I have no idea how they did not get an internal employee revolt yet. I didn't dare ask :|
We pretty much don't communicate in any reliable way and insert all of these strange rules on our tracking system so things don't get lost.
Ridiculous.
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Nope. I don't mess with it. I am using GAFYD though.
Very interesting! I wonder if spammers steer clear of @gmail.com addresses to prevent Google's algorithms from learning about their spam. (If so, they probably want to steer clear of GAFYD addresses, too, but maybe they don't know how to identify them).
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Nope. I don't mess with it. I am using GAFYD though.
Very interesting! I wonder if spammers steer clear of @gmail.com addresses to prevent Google's algorithms from learning about their spam. (If so, they probably want to steer clear of GAFYD addresses, too, but maybe they don't know how to identify them).
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I have heard it many times here and elsewhere, but customized email addresses are a huge boon for having your own domain that I'm discovering.
I have one for my wife, son, and I. It makes life so easy when people ask for an email address and I say firstname@firstnamelastname.com (and my surname is really short and really common). Invariably, some think you are some sort of uber hacker because you pay $7/year for this service.
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> It also sounds like the boss didn't bother asking the employee at their 1:1's about what they thought needed changing, or maybe he was just unapproachable. 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…
Coming from the UK, I'm always amazed at how important health insurance is in the US, and what a broad range of quality of healthcare there is. Our company provide a free, private healthcare (BUPA), but I've never felt the need to use it. Recently, I had surgery for an ACL tear. Unfortunately, for some reason, it later went septic. The day the consultant found it was septic he rushed me into surgery that afternoon an…
The 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…
Sometimes an E-mail is used on other company systems as a log-in, in whole or in part. I used to sympathize with past co-workers who had names much longer than mine, imagining them having to type "really_long_first.really_long_last@company.com" just to log into some web site. I've also seen IT people enforce their random rules on everyone, leading to things like "rba186" as someone's actual E-mail address name instea…
Works better than my current company, which does first initial + middle initial + 5 letters of your last name.