IANAL, this is also for UK.
I as well was employed in the UK last year and had my contract checked by a lawyer. The contract contained few vague clauses regarding IP discovered during the term of the employment and some non competes with any business of the company or of the group companies. The lawyer confirmed the only safe route would be to have an explicit agreement providing me IP ownership and entrepreneurial freedom signed by the company.
Then it depends what your relation is to the company. Do you want to tell them you have more ambitions than being a loyal employee ? If your bosses are a 'general' management and not a founder etc., I very much doubt you will achieve anything positive yourself. I believe these contracts are a norm here from what I heard as well. (I quit in the end before starting my venture).
Actually I do rack up about that much here in London. Can't switch to a yearly plan since I won't be staying that long.
And that's nothing compared to other bills :)
-Managed to : quit my day job, start a startup fulltime, release a product. scored few customers. Market has long established players but we have a unique differentiating approach.
-Not yet managed to : ramen profitability. Product is on the market for about a month, new version based on a lot of feedback is coming in early january.
-Goals for 2011: beyond ramen profitability, work, research (I tend to focus on algorithmic products), release a new web app and to get traction.
Possibly will need to do a bit of contracting in between which will slow things down a little.
> Of all the graduate students I met, you could more or less divide them into two classes
Agree. I almost went for it as well, though for a challenge and as a competition - publish the best paper in the best conference. Seemed like not too many people viewed it as that.
Here's my experience with HHs from the financial industry. There is a large batch of newbie HH's coming straight from college who are pushed hardly to overperform and 'make it'. I've found that the inexperienced recruiters can be quite pushy and aggressive and so frankly, in situations like you describe just say thank you and bye quickly.
The established and more senior recruiters will be much more professional and polished. They all have their quirks and little tricks, but just learn to deal with it and if you're senior enough, be patient to find appropriate recruiters.
There is another "trick" solution : Let's denote a point when the fly turns around to be a step. Then just notice, from any one step the next, the fly travels exactly 1.5x the distance of any of the bicycles, since it goes 15mph versus the bicyclye's 10mph. This holds at each step, so is true of the total distance traveled as well. But alltogether, one bicycle will travel exactly half of the 20miles, so 10miles. So the fly will travel 15miles.
>Turns out that there’s a strong correlation between a student’s grade and their assessment of the professor’s abilities.
In my experience with classmates, it initially might also look like this correlation is true, however I think the hypothesis is a bit more involved.
In one case, one class was taught with quite easy grading policies and many people ended up getting good grades - yet the smart students were unhappy with the professor and lack of challenge. In another cases, I've seen quite difficult abstract math classes and smart students would complain about the teacher as well - because of personal incompatibility - the teacher's style just didn't click with the student. And also, many times weak students would express a lot of respect and positive rating of a professor even though the teaching was over the top of their heads.
Yet obviously there were the lazy/less smart types who would just reduce the challenge to complaining about the prof - yet they are probably likely to complain about people in different situations (i.e. job)
Then it depends what your relation is to the company. Do you want to tell them you have more ambitions than being a loyal employee ? If your bosses are a 'general' management and not a founder etc., I very much doubt you will achieve anything positive yourself. I believe these contracts are a norm here from what I heard as well. (I quit in the end before starting my venture).