scrapcode

I'm interested in more lit on the subject, but I never understood how anyone sells anything via cold-calling. I understand why SPAM works - because it has a very small barrier to entry and it works on the idea of converting a small fraction of messages sent. But cold-calling takes man-hours and I can only imagine it's sole purpose is to catch individuals that simply would rather pay you to end the call rather than say "no."

Even worse is door-to-door sales. My neighborhood has big "no soliciting" signs at the entrances, but at certain times of the year we get huge swaths of salesmen and it's typically for the exact same services at different times of year. Once I was working on my boat late at night in my garage with the door halfway open. I had a pesticide service salesman zip up my driveway on a segway and come inside my garage and start pitching. I couldn't help but to lose my stuff on him. Do these tactics really work? Is it a certain demographic? Because I just don't grok.

I have never in it's lifetime used Yelp. It has been plagued with shit like this from the beginning.

I do have an adjustable standing desk. I have tried days where the goal was to stand all day, but it just doesn't work out that way. Once I sit down and get in the "zone," the next thing I know the day is over.

I went from a pretty physically active job in facilities management to an IT role working from home about 3 years ago and have had a slew of physical issues that I think are related to sitting down 10+ hours a day such as sciatica. I real a book called "Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World" by Dr. Kelly Starrett and it's pretty damning. Similar to the old comparison that smoking a cigarette takes ~7 minutes off of your life, they claim that every hour you sit down takes ~11 minutes off of your life.

Regardless of everything I have read about sitting down being terrible for you, I just can't seem to get into a routine of standing up. Once I sit down for an engagement / lunch / etc., I just simply don't make it back up that day. I have become terribly lazy, I guess.

Okay - that makes a bit more sense, not having to list your involvement with a union.

That seems absolutely ridiculous to me... what am I missing? I can lie about my work experience in order to infiltrate a business and form a union?

I’m in a predominately administrative position for a large organization, with an education in development and a lot of freelance experience, but that’s just not the path my professional career took. Our system privileges are strict and I have to dance around things like SharePoint, PowerApps, PowerAutomate, Access, Excel, and sometimes VB Script within… I have access to Node and Python, but user privs are blocked at using npm. I’ve tried to request perms to utilize basic packages such as Yeoman in order to develop in SPFx SharePoint Framework and they consider each package an application that would require a thorough vetting process

All that to say, it’s an absolute cluster-fsck to automate anything with the proper tooling. If there is any way I can just do it in Excel these days, I do it. I’ve created some pretty ridiculous stuff in it. The upside is that once I am able to navigate cutting all of this red tape and use proper tools, I’ll have plenty of projects in mind and likely be asked to return as a contractor for double+ the money to maintain them in retirement.

Rails was fun but combined with the uniqueness of Ruby, RoR always felt a little "too magic" for me.

Yeah, I get that- I guess I meant more of my trade categorization. I don't really have a specialty. I really am just an "IT Guy" for a large org with a background in dev, so I'm seeked out for things that seem like that skillset might favor (which ends up just being stuff like Sharepoint pages and BI dashboards unfortunately). Maybe I could come up with something "buzzy" for my son to tell his friends...

This might be a different response, but I think about this a lot. From my earliest memories, I have loved technology and especially software development. I got involved in a very large low-tech industry early on and I now have the golden handcuffs on. I've kept up with development, even finished my CS degree. I held on to the idea that I would hold the title of a real "software engineer" one day, instead of solo-ing internal tools.

Until I actually had the chance to. I have somehow gotten to a spot where I make what a senior dev does, and realized my responsibility as a father and putting "food on the table" trumps my "legacy," or at least for now. It's a boring, large-org gig without a solid definition of what I actually do. But when forced to reflect, I have it really good. Maybe one day I may go for it again.

In my experience, and I honestly haven't put much thought into this, but the 'marketing' behind math is pretty bad and I'm not sure if I have any good ideas. For kids like me, that quite frankly didn't give a shit about anything, it was hard to realize how anything I was learning would help me in my future - especially with complex mathematics. Later in life I realized how it opens up a greater understanding of almost anything, and can be a super power akin to mastering MS Excel in the corporate world.

I spent many of my days in the woods as a kid and would get terrible poison ivy/oak (I'm not really sure which one affects me the most, if not both) every year. I felt like I have kinda had "grown out of it" as I still spend quite a bit of time in the sticks, but I get it much less or it's less serious. Until last year when I had it all over my hands for about a week and it was absolutely brutal.

I should have better hinted at my psuedo-sarcasm. I do find meaningful in-person interaction and collaboration are valuable for personal, professional, and mental reasons. However, the real beneficial interactions seem to happen only infrequently, and when they do I don't think that what we have to give up for the slight chance to realize those moments to happen a small percentage of the time are worth the squeeze (work/life balance, commute times, etc.). Hybrid situations in my experience only end up providing the worst of both worlds as everyone isn't in-person at the same time.

The best setup is that my organization builds an office that is a 10-15 minute walk from my existing home and I come in whenever I want. And whenever I decide to come in, everyone else does too. Until that happens I guess I'll just have to settle with fully remote.

They stormed an exec's office building and held it hostage for 10 hours. Is it that surprising that they're getting terminated?

My suggestions were completely out in left field.

Unfortunately, this pet-owner energy mismatch extends to those who live in all types of environments. People will often seek a companion putting plenty of research into their looks, size, and how much they shed - without paying mind to the breed's temperament. I work with high-drive waterfowl retrievers that have seemingly endless energy and they can really start to act up without proper frequent exercise. They require multiple 20+ minute sessions of training/running per day that would be equivalent to many miles of running each session.

Flipped the other way around, I researched what aircraft my local flight school had and started using sims with VATSIM before pursuing my PPL. My CFI was impressed with my radio acumen when I started and I imagine it saved me a good deal of money in some regard (less training needing to be spent there).

Nothing replaces getting in the air, but using a sim certainly can make those (expensive) hours up in the air more enjoyable.

With certain requirements from large corporations switching from usage or license-based pricing to models such as charging per employee in the overall organization, it's hard to imagine it doesn't involve a little greed. It makes the choice even easier when clear alternatives are much more economical.

Imagine for example you're a small shop with your own budget in an org the size of Alphabet with a couple of Java servers that you purchase support to the tune of $5k/year and then they all of a sudden want to charge $1,000,000/month because there are ~200k employees within your larger organization.

It gets even more convoluted when you get into hardware support, where the support itself outside of warranty can be more expensive annually than replacing the hardware and getting N years of support with warranty.

I'm in the enterprise procurement world and it's mind-boggling to me how many software companies in the past two years have forced themselves to $0 revenue from us by trying to double (or more!) their already exorbitant prices.

I'm interested in learning this workflow... are there any YT examples that you know of? I just can't see how it would work in my head. Are you using the "Add" screen to constantly add cards using hotkeys?

The problem is that generally for the IC the risk to the physiological, safety, and security isn't worth the reward of what they would gain by opening up to management even if it were genuine.

To add to the humor of this post, the author with an engineering background miscalculates 451 - 439 to be 11 new subscribers.

Difficult to find anything meaningful for "SOON" in G. Can you elaborate?

I think you're asking a pretty profound question here, a. la "What is the meaning of life?" Not all of life's work has to be such a drudge. I would argue that you certainly have not won "the game" if nothing seems worth it from where you sit.

Has it not afforded you the opportunity to pursue hobbies / travel / etc that you desire? Has your work never been interesting or given you a spark to learn new things about our world / universe / inner-workings of personal relationships? I believe it is much more about the journey than the finish line.

My first thought was something along the lines of "great to see these young kids doing this kind of work." Doing that math hurt my soul.

Kind of in the same boat - but I've found that just like this article mentions, there's nothing small enough that I have found that is always with me when needed other than my iPhone... so I've used that to justify getting the version with the best camera at times when I upgrade.

How do you feel about Blazer or is it something you're even exploring?

Like you and another commenter point out, incentive amounts send a different message depending on the context.

Out of curiosity I once did a small amount of "research" on different car sales payment plans and the commission for selling a car was much lower than I had imagined. In that industry I would imagine that the benefits of base salary level end after onboarding, and begin to have a negative correlation with their performance afterward.

One would like to hope that some of these companies act in a manner that when the shoe is on the other foot, and it is an employees market again, that they will be judged by their actions.