The endurance sport of poor people is called survival.
1,511 karma · joined January 4, 2013
Once my car was badly damaged by someone who ran a stop sign. It was clearly the other driver's fault. Her insurance was Allstate. They strung me along for more than a month "investigating" this obvious situation.
My car was an older one that was worth about the cost of the repairs, and they probably thought I would just give it up. But it was my only transportation and I needed it for work.
I did some research on California's insurance regulations and discovered their requirement that claims be settled within 40 days. After 40 days passed, I wrote a email similar to the letter examples in this article, giving then five days before I reported them to California's insurance department.
It was astonishing to see the immediate change in their behavior. The adjustor who had been playing telephone tag for weeks called me within an hour and arranged for a body shop near my home to start work immediately.
They laugh at angry bluster, but will move mountains to appease a focused person who can bring a regulatory agency down on them.
A. Call the carpenters' union and take whoever they send over.
B. Ask some carpenters you trust if they know any decent carpenters who are looking for work, and when they show up at the job site sober with appropriate tools, you put them to work.
It's a slightly different process than programming.
Q: So, your resume says you've been a systems administrator for 10 years. Have you worked much with Linux?
A: Sure, almost all my experience has been with Linux.
Q: How much experience do you have with Red Hat. That is what we use here.
A: Hmmm. Red Hat. Most of the servers I've worked on are Debian based. But I worked a lot with Fedora in college.
Q: But not Red Hat?
A: Well I have some Red Hat experience. I had a temp job where I was setting up Red Hat servers back in 2008.
Q: How long was that.
A: About six months.
Q: Well, perfect! We have an internship available to someone with six months of Red Hat experience! But wait a minute... What version of Red Hat was that?
I think the OP is right. His dad was a surrogate for his own fears. It's easy to put parents up on a pedestal and see them as the voice from above, but in reality the only difference between parents and children is age. A different life stage might bring a different attitude about security and such, but that doesn't mean forgetting about what it means to be young. The OP's dad himself had the pioneering urge and acted on it. He understands.
I'm in my fifties and recently back to the security of regular employment after quitting my good job 12 years ago to start my own business. It was a long, hard time, without much to show for it, but I don't regret any of it, and my three kids turned out fine.
As another dad to the OP: I wish you the best of luck. I'm sure you'll do great.
They had video games in the lobby, but the recruiter warned me "Don't play them!" She told me a previous candidate she took there got a job, but was later fired for playing a video game on company time.
Entrepreneurs feel to their bones that their dreams are too great a part of themselves to so totally put under other people's control. And they don't believe anybody but themselves can truly understand their dream or pull it off.
For example, when I was living in Japan around 1996, we needed a kerosene heater for our apartment. We went to the big department store, and they had a lot of different ones. Each of them had a sticker affixed describing the various features and advantages, but they were mind-numbingly similar. But one of the stickers had a photo of Mai-chan, the cheerful and engaging child star of a cooking show that we had enjoyed on Japanese TV a couple years earlier.
My wife pointed it out to me, and we ended up getting that heater. Not because it was any better, but because we liked Mai-chan, and her photo was on it. Of course Mai-chan has absolutely nothing to do with heaters, and we knew it. But we didn't care.
We always called it the "Mai-chan" heater, and even though we left it behind when we returned to the states, I guarantee if I mention the Mai-chan heater to my wife today, nearly 20 years later, she'll smile and know exactly what I'm talking about.
The puppy screenshot in the original post has a similar effect on me. A part of me wants to reach out and pat the cute dog on the head. But I can't. But I can click the button, which is what he obviously wants me to do. Sure it's not at all rational. But it motivates people. I suggest keeping the dog and adding it all your advertising. Make it your mascot. You can't go very wrong with a puppy!
A couple of examples of my own:
Around 1996, I bought a cassette recorder made by Aiwa, which had been a fairly upscale electronics brand. It looked nice from the outside, but when I examined it closer after buying it, I realized it was a fairly crude, generic cassette recorder of the time, made in China, probably the generic output from a factory there that Aiwa had slapped their name onto.
It failed in less than a month. I brought it to the store for a replacement and that one failed too within thirty days, exactly the same way the first one did. Obviously, Aiwa had not done extensive testing on this model, and I think probably didn't even design or supervise its manufacture.
In the early 2000s, I bought a Sony Palm OS PDA. It was very advanced and had great features that I loved. But it failed in two weeks due to bad connection to the lamp that lit the LED display. After a few minutes' search on the Internet, I saw this was a well-known problem with this device, caused by a design flaw.
I took it back to the store, and got a replacement that failed exactly the same way in two weeks. The store wouldn't give me another, so I had to rely on Sony's warranty service.
It was my worst-ever warranty experience. After a long conversation with customer service reps in India, I was able to convince them it was actually failing. They sent me a box to return it in. It took almost a month to come back, only to fail with the same problem about three months later.
I went through the whole process again, waited another month. This time the repaired (or replaced) device came back rattling around in a box with no packing material. It too failed, several days after the one-year warranty expired.
I think the decline of the Japaneses electronic giants has been caused by a combination of several things. Japanese technology companies built their reputations during the late Sixties and Seventies, at the start of the Japanese economic boom, when they had a highly skilled workforce willing to work at relatively low wages, compared to the US or Europe. They had already sharpened their quality and innovative abilities in the intense domestic Japanese market, which was extremely competitive and where the consumers were very picky about quality. That market was protected, so there was almost no competition from overseas.
When they moved into Western markets, they were the young, scrappy underdog taking on dinosaur companies like RCA and Phillips, that could not respond fast enough to compete effectively against them. They were also aided by the low value of the yen relative to the dollar, which made their products a very good value.
So all of these things have changed. Complaints of unfair trade eventually forced Japan to open their domestic market to overseas competition. As the article pointed out, now Japanese companies are the dinosaurs in their domestic market, competing against Apple and Samsung. Meanwhile, the yen is very high against foreign currencies, which hurts them badly in export markets.
The Japanese labor market has also changed. Younger Japanese are much less willing to work with the dedication their parents and grandparents had. Wages have gone up, and are equal to or higher than those in the US and Europe, and like those countries, they have tried to cut costs by shifting manufacturing overseas, which has resulted in a decline in quality.
Also, the Japanese population is declining, with fewer and fewer young workers, and those coming into the job market have been conditioned to expect comfortable, high-paying, lifetime office jobs, not manufacturing jobs.
Meanwhile, the inefficiencies of the lifetime employment system in Japanese companies have made it very difficult to adapt to changing circumstances by laying off workers, even as that system is starting to break down.
It's like a perfect storm of bad news for Japanese companies, but in many ways it is very similar to what happened to electronics giants in the US thirty years earlier as they tried to defend against Japanese competition and eventually failed.
It took a lot of dedication to learn programming. You'd have to wait in line with a bunch of other students to submit your program on cards or paper tape, run it once, debug and fill out new cards, and repeat the next day. The output would be printed on paper (no video). I wrote a blackjack program, but the teacher wouldn't let me run it because it was too interactive. He wanted us to write batch processing programs that calculated water bills. It was a big reason why I stopped programming and didn't come back for 15 years.
I discovered the key to fantastic typing under those conditions was not the mechanics of the keyboard--it was the layout of the letters.
After working at it full-time for a year or so, I started suffering wrist pain so bad I had to use voice recognition software (which sucked). I switched to the Dvorak layout and by the time I was proficient, the pain had disappeared, and I could type about 10 WPM faster. The pain never came back
It took about six months to remap my brain and muscle memory. Nowadays, it's sometimes a pain if I have to temporarily use another computer and I don't have access to the settings that change the layout. If I see that situation coming, I just bring my own keyboard to work. The only time it became a bigger problem was in a job where IT required a doctor's note before even allowing me to connect another keyboard to the computer or change the setting. I solved that problem by getting another job.
I use a keyboard that can be switched between Dvorak and normal, mainly for the convenience of non-Dvorak users who need to use my computer from time to time (This one: http://www.typematrix.com/), but I find the mechanics or type of keyboard (for example ergonomic or not) fades into insignificance compared to the difference between Dvorak and QWERTY.
Still, a nicely built keyboard can really improve the typing experience. My laptop is a Lenovo, and I love the feel of the keyboard on it.
I don't care what the keycaps say, because I totally touchtype. I bought the cheapest keyboard available for my Raspberry Pi, and the cheap feel is kind of annoying, but the difference between that one and the Lenovo is like between 70% and 90%, despite the quality difference, and most of that is based on having to get used to a different layout of the non-letter keys like delete and control, and not the quality of the mechanism.
I've been coding a lot these days and the work happens much more in the brain and less on the keyboard than in translation. That being the case, I think the appeal of a very high-quality keyboard for programming is probably more a matter of taste than practicality. It's like owning a Ferrari. You will never push it near its limit, but its really fun to drive.
Another consideration: programming makes very heavy use of symbols compared to text writing, and I think a true programmer's keyboard would be one that puts those symbols in easy reach.
So my keyboard recommendations to hackers would be: Find a keyboard with a layout that supports your programming efforts. Next consider what feels good and appeals to your taste. Finally, if you write a lot of text in other contexts besides coding, and if you have some time to suck at typing for six months before getting much better at it, try Dvorak. It will speed up those really long HN posts.
My theory is that poor people rely on cooperation with others to survive, and this forces them to develop compassion and learn good human relations at a young age. Rich people on the other had don't need others so much, and instead are much likely be in competition with them.
Even in family relations this applies. Siblings in poor families offer much needed support to each other. In rich families siblings seem more likely to be considered as competitors for parental affections at a young age, and competitors for inheritance when older. This mentality of constant competition is poisonous.
Honestly, I think that being rich is a pretty clear path to ultimate unhappiness. Better to be slightly poor in money and rich in the things that actually bring happiness, like family, health, friends, spare time, and a clear conscience.
Human beings appear to be naturally cyclical beings who live in a cyclical universe. So it makes sense, and it's very healthy to realize it and plan accordingly. The phenomenon seems particularly pronounced in creative, innovative people who have some measure of control over their daily activities.
* I was hired as a commodity, not a person, and treated as one.
* Management beyond my immediate supervisor had a fantasy about our working situation that colored their every decision, and no effort by front-line personnel could lead them to reality.
* My company had a failing business model, and thought they could squeeze the difference between expectation and reality out of the people doing the actual work that supported that model.
* Immediate supervisors thought loyalty meant not questioning.
* Evaluations were based on arbitrary criteria that had little to do with actual job success.
* My manager's response to pointing any of this out was "You should be grateful you have a job at all."
In a week I will be starting a new job at a small, but successful startup that appears to be the exact opposite of my previous job. I feel really sorry for the (quite talented) people who are still there, and I am grateful to that company for teaching me what kind of job not to take.
I found the late night period very relaxing, and productive if I decided to read or write something. I found an article similar to this one around that time, and thought "Aha! That explains it!"
Unfortunately, my family has come to join me here, and I've made a lot of new friends, and I'm definitely not going to sleep at 8 pm anymore. So the phenomena has ended. I kind of miss it!
I'm 55. I guarantee I've suffered age discrimination when looking for work, and it obviously sucks. But once I'm on the job, it doesn't take long for people to see what I can do and forget the grey hair and wrinkles.
Perhaps it is a mainly American thing. I've never worked in Europe, but the Europeans I've worked with are definitely mellower.
Also, from my experience, the noisier you are, the more insecure. Like I said, non-dickheads have better ways to command respect.
The guy that listened to someone else before accepting the OP's opinion might have done so because he knew the other person better or respected him more for a non-gender based reason. Or maybe the idea didn't sink in until he heard it twice.
Getting attention in a meeting where several loud confident people are pontificating can be difficult if you are not a loud, self-confident person, or if they don't already respect you.
But I don't think the OP needed to escalate to crack pipes right away, although it's a great line. A "Guys, we don't use type-two data!" loud enough to be heard over everybody else's voices and repeated until it worked probably would have done the trick without affecting perf scores. It depends on the culture of the group. There is usually some accepted way in a group to interrupt conversations that are going nowhere. My guess is that anyone would have been dinged by that boss for the crack comment, just because that's his way of dealing with things.
Also, filling unappreciated and oppressed can become a self-fulfilling prophesy in men as well as women. If you go in there unsure they will pay attention to you, they probably won't. If you go in there thinking, "I'm not going to say much, but when I do, they had better pay attention, because I know what I'm talking about," they will sense it and listen, no matter who you are.
One thing I think isn't understood by the women who post things like this is that men are always in competition. It's like a wolf pack where a pecking order must be established.
In any meeting some guys who are trying to be alpha are going talk over or ignore other people they perceive as beneath them, or who they want to put beneath them, men as well as women. It's not a gender thing as much as it's a power thing. The way to overcome it is stand up for yourself and to establish your competence in whatever the group respects whether it be fisticuffs in the Army or technical skill in a company.
I suspect that the crack pipes remark, coupled with her obviously correct understanding of the problem at hand, won her respect points with her co-workers that will make them more likely to listen to her later on, no matter what the boss thought.
In the same way, having her opinion confirmed by another respected person probably made the coworker in the second example more likely to accept her opinion without confirmation the next time.
Basically, nobody gets respect right away. It doesn't come with a title, or even because you are a man. If you don't have the type of personality that immediately commands respect, you'll have to earn it step-by-step. Even if you do immediately command it, you can lose it very quickly if you don't show yourself worthy of it.
Also men test each other and especially newcomers by teasing or pointed jokes. The ability to "take a joke" is highly respected. It's not an attractive trait, but it happens. You can just ignore it (recommended), or you can do it better than they do. Depends on your personality. It usually stops after a while. Complaining about it usually makes it worse. In one sense, if men are doing this to a woman among them, it means they have accepted her to some extent. Now all she has to do is start working her way up the pecking order. A sardonic smile and a comeback (even a dumb one) can work wonders in this situation.
None of this, however should be taken as a reason to accept actual sexual harassment by word or deed. If that happens, a clear, sharp "I'm sorry, what did you just say???" or "Get your hands off me!" is called for, followed by a trip to that person's supervisor or higher until the matter is resolved.