DoubleGlazing

Oh I know, but what can you do. It's your word against theirs. And if you were to tape the interview and successfully claim for unfair dismissal your name will get around the local IT industry pretty quickly.

I have found that with a shortage of developer talent companies are quite happy to pay to get staff who have no baggage that can affect productivity. In other words they'll pay you loads, but you better be in the office all the time, and maybe throw in a bit of overtime as well.

Most companies that claim to be family friendly are anything but.

I find that a lot of the tactics used to deflect or avoid answering awkward questions in interviews just do not work.

There are two questions that always get me in interviews. The first one is the salary one. If I am evasive, or try to deflect, the interviewer will probe deeper. They just wont take no for an answer. In fact I've even been told straight up "Give us a figure, or we won't proceed".

Another one is about my children. They are five and seven and finish school in the afternoon, when they are collected by their after school service. Under EU law interviewers cannot ask about my family life, but they do. They ask what my children's ages are, they ask when the finish school, and crucially what happens if there is a problem that would require me to dash out to pick them up (illness etc). When I say my wife will take care of that they ask what she does for a living. If I say that I'd rather not discuss that then I can be certain no matter how skilled I am for the job, I wont be getting it.

In my experience most interviewers know all the tricks. If they want an answer to a question they will get it. If you don't play ball then you probably wont get the job.

The problem there is what if you have two different apps connecting to the same DB. When the DB enforces referential integrity both apps can be certain the data in the DB is correct and they wont be able to mess with it. When the apps have to take on that role each app must implement (i.e. unnecessarily duplicate) the same integrity checking functionality. In a complex environment where you might have different apps using the same NoSQL data store that becomes very difficult to manage.

Although he author doesn't take into account that not all web apps are created equal and the SQL/NoSQL argument isn't black and white... I do find myself slightly nodding in agreement with what he says.

NoSQL doesn't reduce development effort. What you gain from not having to worry about modifying schemas and enforcing referential integrity, you lose from having to add more code to your app to check that a DB document has a certain value. In essence you are moving responsibility for data integrity away from the DB and in to your app, something I think is quite dangerous.

NoSQL has its place, but I do feel that it is a bit more hyped up than it should be.

That is a big part of it. Unfortunately when the department manager looks at lines of code as a measure of productivity, guess who gets a pat on the back....

Oh I agree with the article. Whenever I lead a project I argue that the team should aspire to follow "lowest common denominator" principles. By that I mean they should work in a way that appreciates the abilities of the least skilled on the team or in a manner that would allow someone coming in off the street to get up and running with the project without needing any help from existing developers. That doesn't mean over simplistic code, it just means good simple design, lots of comments and docs and asking around for permission before implementing an obscure or exotic design pattern.

What slows down my productivity more than anything is looking at someones code and thinking "Why did they do that?" Simplicity pay off in the long term.

However in reality, and what my comment was referring to, is that every sizable team has that one dev who rattles off code quicker than anyone else. Yes it works, but it will have a lack of comments, or they don't check in often enough resulting in merge issue or worst of all they implement a design pattern no one else has heard of.

I've worked with people who could be classed as almost a 10x programmer.

Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team.

I have found that high-speed programmers tend to develop a very personalised workflow style. They do things their way, they code their way and forget that other people may have to maintain that code.

Apparently I'm on the contact lists of several talent agencies.

Which is odd I would pop out a turtles head in fear if I found myself on stage or in front of a camera.

I only noticed after they had left the country. I did go to the Guards (Irish police), but they confirmed what I thought that because they were now out of the country then there wasn't a lot that could be done.

We also reported them to Couchsurfing who seemed completely disinterested.

In a somewhat similar vein, a few years back my wife got in to the whole Couchsurfing thing - which could be said to be a forerunner of AirBnB.

A nice couple from the other side of the world stayed with us for the weekend. When they left I noticed they had taken six Intermec Windows CE warehouse scanners with them. I'd been working from home for a bit so that why I had them, I was updating the software to work with our new ERP system.

They were backpacking so I'm not too sure what they planned to do with them. These devices are hard to hide and they didn't take the charging cradles.

I had to pay to replace them out of my own pocket as our home insurance wouldn't cover work owned items.

I used to work for a company where a vendors first unsolicited sales call would get them on our grey list. That being a list of vendors we would only consider purchasing from as an absolute last resort.

A second unsolicited sales call would result in permanent blacklisting.

Our IVR system warned callers that unsolicited sales calls would result in this action.

In the IT department alone 90% of incoming calls were sales calls. After this rule was brought in the volume was much reduced.

Also, we learned a lot of new swear words from angry salespeople.

My wife's cousin had something like this happen to her two years ago when she was planning her wedding.

She browsed a few specialist wedding sites for inspiration and when she went to to some well known retail sites to start pricing things they seemed to know she was getting married and promoted wedding goods and services on their front page to her.

It freaked her out no end. I suggested a few plugins that seemed to put a stop to it. But a few weeks later she did start getting wedding related snail mail spam.

Its very creepy, especially after the whole Target teenage pregnancy thing.

Seems like a good way to launder money.

The more people try to build simple and "elegant" front ends, the more us backend developers have to do to support them.

I seem to be doing a lot more "mashup" work than ever before, joining up disparate back end systems in order to hide it all behind a simple modern front end. In the past if I was developing an order processing system I would work on the view/UI side of things as well, now I expose the functionality via an API and let the front end guys develop a nice interface for it all.

Also lets not forget you don't actually want any mission critical, confidential or security stuff happening on the front end no matter how WebAssembly gets.

There will always be a backend.

Dublin Ireland.

We have an infestation of middle aged men who drive mid to high end Audis (always painted black) with a set of gold clubs permanently stored in the boot.

An Audi dealer in Dublin.

I don't know the actual specifics, just that my boss came in to work one day raging about it. I suspect the dealer was just looking for excuses to not do the fix.

But just a cursory read around the web seems to imply that this is happening more and more and to be honest I think it would be unwise to assume that manufacturers wont make it an official policy at some point.

My old boss had a fancy top of the line Audi with all the trimmings.

One day a fault developed with the seatbelt sensors on the rear seats. He kept getting the warning beeps to fasten the belts when no one was on those seats.

It was still in warranty so he took it get fixed. The dealer pulled his driving logs from the on board computer/data recorder and said his driving was too aggressive and that violated the warranty.

Truth be told his driving was terrible. I accepted a lift home from him once, and only once because his driving scared the bejeesus out of me. But that being said how could that affect the pressure sensors in the rear seats?

It took some solicitors letters to get the dealer to agree to a warranty repair.

I think its inevitable that manufacturers are going to use all this data to stop you claiming under your warranty. "Oh dear you slammed your door too hard one day, I'm afraid that invalidates your warranty". Insurers will demand this data in before giving you a quote. Its also likely that there will come a time when this data will be used to help price your car if you sell it or trade it in. And of course the government will want to use positioning data to automatically issue parking fines.

And this ignores all the obvious security risks that come along with this sort of stuff, for example all those BMW keyless car thefts.

I worked for a company that thought it had a really top level power backup system. The server room had 15 minutes of UPS, all PCs had at least 5 mins. Out the back was a big generator with 24 hours worth of diesel. It was all controlled by a fancy control system that fed light displays in every room indicating if we were on mains power, UPS power or generator power.

One day during a power cut the generator kicked in as it was supposed to, but a minute later it spluttered to a halt. After much fiddling around by maintenance staff they gave up and we were all told to go home.

The postmortem revealed that the diesel had become contaminated with all sorts of gunk - water, grit/sand and lumps of unidentifiable "stuff". The best laid plans and all that.

Edit: And cigarette butts as well.

Don't know how well this would work with British Airways or Aer Lingus. No matter what your boarding pass says, if your name isn't on their pre-printed list you wont be getting in.

I think the bigger takeaway from this is that there is just so much going on with modern technology that we now have to consider the security risks of every little helpful "feature".

For example...

  - Lock screen notifications..
  - Medical info feature.
  - Emergency numbers feature.
  - Lock screen wallpapers that might give something away.
  - Email clients with poor security and where they do have security each one works differently.

All this increases the attack surface giving attackers a few more opportunities to exploit.

My wife hails from a little rural village a few miles outside of Syracuse, NY. A place that when the weather gets bad, it REALLY gets bad. There have been snow storms where they have been without power and blocked in for a few days. As a result of this my in-laws have become preppers without realising it. They keep a supply of petrol, dried food, water, fire wood, batteries, gas bottles and have various types of radio at their disposal. They also have a backup generator for the house. They are in the process of fitting solar to try and avoid using the generator when things are bad because in a snow storm a generator sound really creepy. They could live for a week without any lifestyle changes if the power went off and the roads were impassible.

When we were getting married and all the extended family arrived at the house for the big do, some relatives turned out to be preppers and were fascinated with the setup. One phrase I kept hearing was "We read in this book that if you do this, then..." and my father-in-law would respond with "Well, when we were actually without power during the 93 blizzard we learned that..." Basically experience trumped mass produced prepper books.

Yep, even if they are bringing up a serious issue they should phrase it as positively as possible.

So, instead of "I'm really unhappy that you are missing targets." say "I notice you're having a bit of an issue with targets, is there anything I can help you with?"

Feedback works when it is fairly instant, friendly and most of all fair.

If you have to do X, Y and Z in n amount of time and you fail then a quick chat about why failed is very useful whilst the issues are fresh in peoples minds.

If you have to wait a few months for your next review then no one really remembers the intricacies of the event, so you aren't really able to flesh out what went wrong or what can be improved.

The friendliness part is vital too. Reviews can easily turn too formal and intimidating, putting the employee on the defensive. Most employees don't want to under performs so don't treat them like they are being accused of something bad.

And I cannot under estimate the fairness part. Only review based on established criteria. Be objective, not subjective. If you let other employees offer feedback then force them to provide evidence and don't just accept their opinion as provided. I was once told by manager that he was family friendly and he was flexible about arrival times, so long as I put the hours in and got the work done. When I took advantage of this for just one week I was given a beating in my review for poor punctuality. When I challenged my manager about his claim to be Okay with this his response was "Do you have that in writing?". I resigned a week later. They begged me stay I refused.

As an EU resident he can simply fire off a subject access request (referencing the local Data Protection Acts) to Google and they have to tell him everything they have on file about him.

I'll let her know. We live in Dublin, I'm Irish but shes from New York - but got her degree in Dallas.

She spent several years as a school district speechie in Texas so she probably knows exactly what you went through.

I also grew up with a rhotacism which I forced out of myself due to bullying. I know what you went through.

Now you mention it I feel like I overlooked the obvious solution.

I did consider that but I didn't want to take the risk of messing things up even further. I figured the cartridge exchange was a safer option.

Incidentally when I called Samson support looking to buy a specific model revision I told them what the mic was used for. When I mentioned it was for people shouting mouth open wide at the top of their voice the support rep said "But that mic is for stuff like Skype and maybe recording a little bit of singing not for shouting at".

I agree.

I mentioned Owls above. You wont believe what it is... just clipart in a nice easel book form. I'm not joking, its just page after page of clipart, accompanied by a manual and 20 page copyright warning booklet.

The thing is Pearson has convinced governments, schools, charities, hospitals etc that this system is the best way to diagnose speech issues. My wife and a lot of her colleagues would beg to differ.

Its really simple software, essentially a VU meter.

The therapy involves getting patients to shout in a certain way and try and reach certain volume levels or follow certain volume patterns. E.g. shout gently for five seconds and gradually ramp up the volume over 10 seconds.

It would be really easy to replicate. I reckon the most time consuming part would be testing and calibration.

The whole app directory is less than 2MB.