iamdave

I ask, having gone into interview after interview in the last few years and just seeing ikea tables lined up with an equally absurd line of monitors and tiny 4x4 foot spaces, desperately decorated so workers can come in and quickly spot their little section of the subdivision, and ultimately deciding "No. I'm not gonna work like this".

Just wondering.

I think that's become the poster child for the most accessible way of delivering a pro-NN argument to the masses; even if I think-personally-it's an incredible oversimplification of otherwise GOOD pro-NN arguments. Popcorn and circuses, etc. If you can explain it to people as "it's gonna hurt your ability to Binge Orange is the New Black Season 22" their ears perk up. If you start talking about "last mile" and startup competitiveness in an increasingly commoditized internet landscape, eyes glaze over.

Perhaps even to the point of possibly being the petard hoisted by the pro-NN crowd when the powers at be decide to focus their attention on that topic, artfully skirt the issue to seem conciliatory to average-joe users while implementing the very types of platforms and policies that have more or less demonstrable affects on the Internet as a platform for Enterprise.

Just my theory.

Inb4 a recruiter comes in and tells me how their job is "hard" and the inherent necessity of treating job applicants like annoying buzzing little flies and how it's everyone elses fault that tech hiring is more broken than a dirigible that hit the ground at warp 10.

At the same time, the hand drawn windows probably make the tutorial less intimidating to the target audience-of which I'm not a member. But got me pondering how I can improve my own documentation in a few areas.

Curious what others might think.

Would you say the manifesto is missing concepts and explanations of the style or are there inaccuracies and in your opinion what are they? You've got a captive audience in me on the affair, I'm not a designer but I oddly like the language of design and hearing specialists discuss it.

Or have I overthought the joke? It's possible, I've done it before.

And maybe they do sound great to that wearer. You don't know. What sounds good enough for them might not be great sound to you. That's perfectly fine. Maybe they did buy them for how they look. Why make that your business? Why do you even care that that's why someone bought the headphones? I go back to my earlier position: it's not your money being spent. It's theirs. Taking people to task for subjective things like this seems like a very strange thing to lord over people for IMO.

Initially I replied thinking you were talking about getting training in a specific set of tasks or platform, you mentioned "Product X".

But it seems, now you're talking about training a worker "to productivity", which is a bit more oblique and not as specific of a regimen against what you initially posited-on this I have somewhat of an easier time giving you the concession.

Let me just ask, before going further: which position are you taking? Training an employee to use a specific tools set that we've established isn't widely used, or training an employee to be most effective and productive day to day?

Or have I misunderstood you altogether?

It's not my job to go out of my way to help these folks meet their retention KPI. Categorically, full-stop and quite literally, that is not my responsibility. I'm a customer who used to pay money for a service, not a call-taker responsible for meeting certain metrics. I don't work for the cable company. I'm not their employee. I'm their customer.

If I don't want to be a member anymore, and I state as such, and repeatedly state as such when said company makes it as difficult as possible to cancel my membership-then I've satisfied my end of that particular transaction. I've stated my business request, I'm asking them in various manners to please honor that request. Where is the malice? If you want to point out that it's probably immature, then I'll probably agree with you. Comparing it to deliberately trying to tank a call-taker though by giving a deceitful and dishonest review I think is an incredible exercise in reaching.

So can you explain this for me? How are you drawing a parallel from me repeating my request to have my service cancelled with maliciously filling out customer response surveys in such a way that deliberately gives the call-taker a negative score?

It got to the point where engineering was down to three people-present company included-and a guy managing us who probably should have been let go long enough and neither myself or the other fellow could really stand to be around even socially-much less as a cohort and colleague (and to this day, the other guy and I strongly believe was the root cause of so many of our other engineers quitting once the former Director left, leaving jerk character as the most senior in the room by longevity alone).

Why? Because the only way to for a working professional to accumulate a "reasonable lifespan" of product knowledge is to anchor themselves to one company? That seems incredibly short-sighted thinking given the changing dynamics of the workplace from remote workers to an increasingly freelance economy where people can work for disparate organizations and still accumulate knowledge, skills and capabilities that you might still find valuable if you weren't looking at arbitrary numbers like how long a person has spent with the same company name in their email signature.

Is it a good way? Sure.

Is it the only worthwhile and relevant way? Mmmmmprobably not.

"Please cancel my service"

"We'd like to retain your business is there anything we can do?"

"Is my service cancelled yet?"

"Why are you cancelling your service?"

"My service is still working, can you cancel it? Is this the cancellation department? Who will be cancelling my service?"

Just pretend like I didn't hear anything they said or asked and keep asking variations of that in an increasingly childlike wondrous tone. Sometimes you can hear the person on the other end getting audibly frustrated until they give in and cancel it just to get you off the phone-and when they finally go "Your service will be cancelled on this date, is there anything else I Can help you with?"

"NOPE THANKS!" and hang up.

Never fails to make me giggle madly. Is it patronizing? Sure. Do I care? No not really-I've asked nicely that I want my service cancelled. That really ought to be the start and end of it. Meeting retention rates is their problem, not mine.

Same thing with upselling at retail establishments. No I'm not a rewards member. No thanks I don't want to sign up. Yep I'm sure. Oh I'm quite aware that I can save 10% over $2500 spent. Hey can I just buy this pair of headphones and gtfo?

Not sure if it still does or not, as I'm in a different DB engine entirely these days, but I kind of grinned with a wee bit of nostalgia checking out this site thinking of that. I cut my teeth on that data set.

Edit: Son of a gun they still offer it https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/framework/data/adone...

"Dedicate a work area for work and nothing else".

All I have on my work desk (which is an actual desk in a smallish room I converted for the purpose) is a monitor, keyboard and mouse and a coffee mug full of pens. The only thing in the room that isn't work is a Dualshock 4 PS4 controller that I use for gaming when I'm on lunch breaks or after work is done and I feel like playing some street fighter.

You don't just work at the house and expect to be productive. Much like muscles in the body working out for a marathon, you have to train at it, exercise and make deliberate efforts to get better. You don't just show up and run if you expect to have a good time.

YMMV though. I'm lucky to be a single-ish guy with a cat and no kids.

Same way branches of the Federal Government delegates responsibilities and procedural obligations to the appropriate agencies.

"Hey your friend did a thing, go congratulate them"

"Hey, a friend knows this person. Go follow them too"

"Hey, your friend just posted a picture of spaghetti, go signal your approval"

Hey.

How about I check in and interact with my friends on my time in a manner I want to?

If you're looking for a genuine and authentic answer: I took up a part-time job writing local columns for high school athletics that turned into a few contributions for Sports Illustrated.

Why?

Because I genuinely love sports reporting and writing. I'm addicted to stats, I love the competition, I will enthusiastically argue for hours about 90's era baseball. I was and remain fully aware it might not be immediately or even eventually profitable, I have no long-term salary prospects, just a middle-of-the-road IT support job (that comparatively for the industry, doesn't pay that great). Combining the two 'jobs' I make enough to live what I consider, for my ends and motivations, a comfortable life doing something I really enjoy doing along with something that supplements everything else.

Journalism in the west is close to dead

I couldn't disagree more. It's not dead, it's evolving-and probably the most directly felt evolution is the delivery mechanisms.

If one wants to talk about objectivity it helps to look at the concept itself a bit more objectively.

So many times I've looked at a peer's code and had a hard time reconciling what the comments and wiki articles said with what their code was attempting to do.

This mindset is probably a godsend to QA teams.

Because it is.

All because someone included a smiley emoji while making a donation to a local community foundation. Lessons were learned because of poor planning admittedly but if you don't take emoji support seriously it's probably because you haven't suffered through a critical outage from poorly supporting character encodings.

We aren't a chat company. We don't even write email clients. We process transsctions. And we lost millions because of a single emoji.

VoIP, especially multi-tenant voip like conferencing is 70% dependent on YOUR local network connection and 30% the provider's infrastructure. Having a high bandwidth pipe is no guarantee for 100% clear and jitterless voip communication. Have you had a network engineer take a deep inspection of voip traffic to see if there's any QoS or packet filtering going on that could degrade performance (i.e. if you're a small office that has your voice traffic occurring side by side with literally every other network device you're GOING to have a bad time).

This is the problem with the "bad apples" phrase. It seems to me people forget the line is "Bad apples spoil the bunch" it's categorically NOT "A few bad apples sure are annoying as heck" as if merely acknowledging that bad apples exist is enough to signal you're doing something about the problem.

Police Departments across the country seem to have a hard time getting this, and as do many of their supporters to the point of "it's a few bad apples" becoming an utterly worthless phrase anymore, IMO.