IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Lmao wtf is this? An excuse for, you know, managing your staff? Some dipshit is spending all of their time not working? Fire them. Blocking sites won't make them work harder, they'll always find other ways of wasting time. Instead, hire people who aren't terrible. This is a flat out awful idea.

Blocking website for reasons other than they are illegal or a network security risk is asinine. Set goals and expectations and either let people meet them or not meet them. We don't work on assembly lines anymore but I see people all the time trying to run shit like "If he's surfing for an hour a day we're losing blah blah blah money." No you're fucking not. You aren't slowing down the assembly line. Work will go on and get done.

Its friday, what are you doing in the office

Thinking about this reminds me of when I had just got my first (what I felt) "real" job. I think I was around 21-22 and finally managed to get out of working retail/grocery and was going to work for a huuuuge insurance company at a big regional office (like 5000 employees at this office) doing electronic records shit. Oh man I was stoked, until I started working there and realized all you did was open mail and scan it. All day fucking long. To top it off, they tracked shit like how many pieces you scanned and how long it took and shit and based your performance on that. Anyway, one of the duties was monitoring a fax queue on your computer. The faxes would show up in like TIFF format and then you'd route them to the proper file by typing a claim number. I could do this shit like 5x faster than anyone else, so what I would do is let them stack up for a half hour while I surfed/fucked about and then slam the queue down to zero again in the next half hour. So I basically was only "working" a half an hour every hour. At first, their shitty tracking system just showed that I was awesome because I did x amount of faxes every hour. At some point though, one of my bitch leads decided that I was "gaming" the system somehow and pulled all the submit times of the faxes which showed that They were only getting submitted during a half hour period of every hour. I get "written up" for this, which I think is bullshit, and they tell me that I can't do faxes anymore because it's better suited for someone who will do them all day as they come in. I got stuck on full time mail opening duty since there was never any shortage of that. Luckily I handled it like a boss, got into the IT department and enjoyed soaking in the hatorade every time I had to go into that department to fix a scanner or computer.

Not sure how much faith to put in the Glassdoor/Indeed salary figures. Got a semi offer on the table for $62 a yearfor Jr Java Developer, Portland area. Not sure if that is competitive or not. I have 6 months experience with another company, no degree.

That sounds about right.

Its now Friday again and after some debate went in to the office and my whole team of 6 didn't show up -_-

Jalynfane said:

Not sure how much faith to put in the Glassdoor/Indeed salary figures. Got a semi offer on the table for $62 a yearfor Jr Java Developer, Portland area. Not sure if that is competitive or not. I have 6 months experience with another company, no degree.

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For having limited experience and no degree this seems decent.

Friday and I "worked from home" yesterday so yeah I'm out at lunch and will commit at 5pm as usual

Deathwing said:

My current work won't allow wfh except for circumstances out of your control. This sounds egregious but I just finished telling one of my employees that working from home because you didn't feel like shoveling your driveway is a fucking weak excuse. So, I'm kinda torn on working from home. I'll readily admit I'm less efficient at home, I just don't have the self control(look at me, posting while at work), and I doubt many computer-savvy people do.

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I think working from home is perfect for shit like not wanting to shovel a driveway or deal with driving in snow or whatever. You can't really treat a modern workplace like some sort of assembly line where if Joe doesn't show up to label the jars or whatever then it messes everyone up. If some developer doesn't come in to the office to write code, who gives a shit. If he commits he commits.

Me personally, I'm both more and less efficient from home. When I actually have real and interesting work to do, I'll do work on it from the minute I get up until I can't keep my eyes open any more from home. Of course on the flip side, if it's during a lull that all of us IT people have, I fuck off with ferocity when I'm at home. Some of the best MMO gaming of my life got done on telecommute days.

It is a mixed bag though. I think your company has to wholeheartedly embrace it and not give a fuck about it for it to work. Trying to work somewhere where people are skeptical about it just makes it not worth it. People also have to be good at it too. I've worked with too many people who can't figure out how to dial in to a conference bridge, join a webex or respond to IMs. They're the ones who really screw the whole thing up for everyone else.

alavaz said:

I think working from home is perfect for shit like not wanting to shovel a driveway or deal with driving in snow or whatever. You can't really treat a modern workplace like some sort of assembly line where if Joe doesn't show up to label the jars or whatever then it messes everyone up. If some developer doesn't come in to the office to write code, who gives a shit. If he commits he commits.

Me personally, I'm both more and less efficient from home. When I actually have real and interesting work to do, I'll do work on it from the minute I get up until I can't keep my eyes open any more from home. Of course on the flip side, if it's during a lull that all of us IT people have, I fuck off with ferocity when I'm at home. Some of the best MMO gaming of my life got done on telecommute days.

It is a mixed bag though. I think your company has to wholeheartedly embrace it and not give a fuck about it for it to work. Trying to work somewhere where people are skeptical about it just makes it not worth it. People also have to be good at it too. I've worked with too many people who can't figure out how to dial in to a conference bridge, join a webex or respond to IMs. They're the ones who really screw the whole thing up for everyone else.

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I've found the majority of people (including myself) are less efficient when working from home.

Frequency makes a difference too. I was definitely less productive on my wfh day when I worked from home once a week. When I did 100% from home for a couple of months I'd say my productivity went way up.

I don't write as much code for sure from home but I usually use it to do things that I've been putting off that need to be done i.e. code review and exploring new libraries/looking for solutions to upcoming problems that don't involve me writing code.

Prior to this job I has another lead dev job for 2 years that was 100% remote and I was no where near as productive as I could have been. They didn't expect much either though. I quit work every day at 2pm and did ~3 hours of side project work which successfully resulted in a product that tons of people love and lead me to getting my current job which pays 50% more for the same title