151–160 of 440 posts
>You cannot take a sick day by telling your team, “I have mental issues and need a day off.” Yes, you can. You can say you need a mental health day. Adults will understand.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think it is a bit different depending on you country. I believe it is comparable in the us with the steep Healthcare prices. in Europe it usually makes sense to contract if you only have smaller projects.
Did both in few parts of Europe. Initially its normally better to contract (but you need to have some chops, nobody hires juniors on contract), but not all countries make this easy or even viable. Once you want to settle, if you want to settle, permanent job under normal circumstances offers better overall package. Maybe not outright amounts, but if you count in things like sickness, holidays, off for kids, social co…
"An example of uncertainty in business is when your CEO tells you they promised a feature to your biggest client and it needs to be built ASAP as highest priority, so all hands on deck. Then a day later they tell you another feature, completely contradictory to the first one, needs to be built as well and is also highest priority. When you tell them they both can't be highest priority, the answer is: make it happen."…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The phenomenon of showing up at Stanford and telling some 21-year-old that he's Jesus Christ and that you're going to give him millions of dollars is a wen on the American business culture matched only by corporate raiding. It's the nerd version of college football/basketball recruiting.
It's so weird. I started to think that maybe this is intentional. It looks as though investors want to invest only in over-optimistic people who believe that we're living in some kind of utopian paradise; at the same time they avoid investing in anyone who has had so much of a faint whiff of how the sausage gets made. It's like the entire system is desperate to keep optimists optimistic and pessimists pessimistic. Wh…
It's too triggering to do any more than skim the article, but having got the general gist of at least some of it, I shall write my top tip here in case it helps anyone (who manages to do it): Negotiate prohibitively high overtime rates.
Early in my career, I worked with a consultant who charged time and a half after hours, and double time after midnight. Every change we did was at like 10pm, and hardly any of them ever went well. I hope to one day find a way to do what he did.
I'll dump this one here as it's still annoying me a bit. So one afternoon I'm sitting there and our sales guy John came in (you know who you are if you're reading this) and described what he'd managed to sell a client. I sat there and I scribbled on bits of paper for hours, did some research and went back to him with the point that it wasn't possible from an algorithmic perspective. Basically he'd assumed that if it…
I haven't worked in a team or with a manager that wasn't receptive and empathetic to burnout or more serious mental health concerns. Guess I got lucky.
What I found in my career is that the good managers do empathize and even sometimes try to improve the situation, but they simply can't.
More often than not the cause of the issues come from decisions done at the top levels of the company.
I've come to believe that there's something about the practice of software development that causes , or can cause mental illness. I've seen a few colleagues over the decades have some very serious issues. It's really quite a serious problem in our industry, imho.
I think that level of executive dysfunction and “catchup” is problematic