> The incentive was that we would have a pizza party IF we hit the deadline.
This same thing happened to me when I was a wee lad. I then personally ordered and paid for a few pizzas, breadsticks, root beer, a greek salad, about $50 all together, and hosted a pizza party myself at work late at night. To get your slice I just had you sign a petition against unpaid overtime and interest in joining the Teamsters Union. A couple guys didn't want to sign, the others did. A few weeks later I was fired with cause, had a better paying job by the end of the week. Company folded around a year later. And good.
Thank you very very much for posting that 1986 article which documents clearly the facts of what was been going on. It is an established documented fact that the tax changes were in fact retroactive and specifically targeted to loot and pillage him specifically.
Yes, yes and yes. Absolutely. Key parts of the sordid, brutal and shameful history of american slavery in the 20th century. US slavery in the last 100 years, and the support and defense of that slavery by the certain groups of interest, should be taught in every social studies and US history class in every credible school. But it isn't. Instead we get propaganda about how that was all in the past and the US is free. Ha. The truth is very different.
That's part of the edit after an extremely useful post with insight into the reality started getting downvoted because it didn't conform with the political or whatever beliefs of the downvoters. HN would be better without the pathetic reactionary losers who use downvoting to promote their political beliefs.
I remember ComputerLand stores. Sounds like he was a hard working guy who earned his success.
Saipan is one of the most corrupt backwards places on earth. As a US trust territory, for many years they had slave plantations that produced clothing for chinese companies which was labelled "Made in USA". Many workers were kept under brutal conditions, raped, beaten and killed. The Saipanese are mostly incredibly lazy and loved this system as it allowed them to have houses full of slave servants and great wealth without ever having to work for it. It all collapsed a few years ago, but there's a close to 100% chance that they are the ones running the scam in this current case.
edit: Keep downvoting this, monkeys! I have no doubt I am one of a small handful of people on HN that has intimate experience of how Saipan works and how corrupt this place is. My post gives true insight to what is going on there. Imagine the worst fundamentalist christian ignorant half retarded hillbilly sex fiend town straight out of the movie Deliverance, but then give them dictatorial control over outsiders, a total lack of desire to work and a strong desire to dominate control and cheat others and you have Saipan. It's like a stereotypical town thought to exist in the backwoods of Arkansas, but it's real, slavery is still legal, and it's part of the US. Absolutely anything involving Saipanese officials that has a money angle for them is a total scam. Since their slave factories collapsed, they have been in desperate straits to steal what they can. I totally believe the CEOs explanation that they backdated their tax code specifically to target him, and then never served him of any real notice of it until now, after they've gotten a bunch of judgements against him in which he had no chance to represent himself because he didn't even know there was a case about this. That is exactly how they work. They are incredibly conniving and will work every system to get what they want. Typical small town american fundamentalist hillbillies, but in a pacific island trust territory. These comments apply to the people in control there. There's also the regular people who hate what has been done to their island over the years, many are ostensibly good people. It's the corrupt people in power that are the troublemakers, and dealing with them is exactly exactly like Southern Bible Thumping Fundamentalist - which the Saipanese basically are. The fundamentalist missionaries infected them with the peculiar sort of madness, entitlement, laziness and corruption that comes with that belief system. And if you had no idea about the slavery and corruption and you are downvoting this you are only proving how mentally you are exactly like them. This post tells you the truth about Saipan, a place that until just now you probably never heard of. Ignorant fools.
It's a bit frustrating to see very insightful contributions like my comment here downvoted. Downvotes isn't meant to be for good points. Let me make it more explicit though for people who have difficulty understanding things.
ENGINEERS THAT CREATE THE THINGS YOU SELL DO NOT CONTRIBUTE BY THE HOUR. THEY CONTRIBUTE BY THE QUARTER, THE YEAR AND THE DECADE. HOURLY WAGE CALCULATIONS ARE THE WRONG WAY TO CALCULATE HOW MUCH THEY ARE PAID BECAUSE THEIR FUNDAMENTAL UNIT OF TIME ISN'T THE HOUR. WERNER VON BRAUN DIDN'T DO ANYTHING NOTICEABLE IN ANY GIVEN HOUR OF DESIGN WORK.
What does this mean in practice to the MBA set? It means that measuring engineering work as cost per hour means there is something seriously wrong with your company because you don't understand the fundamental nature of the work.
We'll assume that whatever it is you are having people do is something that is intrinsically rewarding, benefits them, and is not taking up their entire life. We're not talking about having interns come in and work 8 hr days on projects you specify for no pay and you retain original copyright ownership as work for hire without pay. It's more like Stack Overflow answers.
As has been pointed out, in such a system by offering cold hard cash, you can and will attract gamers and the wrong element by paying, and you can and will also destroy the intrinsic motivation of the many sincere people who enjoyed contributing for free before.
At some level of contribution there needs to be pay off though, especially if you are directly monetizing contributions. I am thinking of youtube here. There are now professional youtube performers, people who make a living writing original comedy and commentary and skits for youtube and earning money from the shared ad revenue. This is only done with top earners who are making enough from ads to actually be able to fund doing it as a full time job. The result has been higher quality material and more stickiness from popular contributors.
Myself I pretty much don't do jack shit in any given hour of the year, so I guess companies that would hire me at those rates are getting ripped off since they aren't getting anything for their money.
On the other hand, over the period of a year, I am amazingly productive and product thousands of times more value than the typical engineer.
Interestingly, the less down time during that year, the fewer incredibly valuable things I make.
Hm, well thanks for the clarification. I just reread it several times and it's not clear. I'll agree that it's ambiguous. It would be interesting to know more. Is this a fixed 25 day cut off then, or is it prorated? Kind of alarming is the part where the monthly salary as an example is £100, surely he meant to type £3000?
It sounds like you might work there? If so I have a couple questions for clarification, in addition to (1) clearing up that the £100 thing was just a random number and not representative (since some Chinese developers do make in that range, so it's not an impossible salary to claim). (2) Did "What’s normal for time off varies from country to country" mean that US employees of the company (for example) are expected to use less days than european ones? That the cut off for what is considered "unreasonable use" differs depending on company. (3) If the answer to that is yes, then are salaries matched to standard market rate in the economy each employee lives in? Are SF based employees paid 20 times as much as the guy in Bangladesh for the same work? (4) With a worldwide workforce, how does the company handle paying social insurance tax and providing for benefits in each country? Are competitive insurance plans offered, a different one for each employee? Or is there some insurance company that is able to provide insurance for all employees regardless of what country they are citizens of and resident in? Thanks for any clarification you can provide, these are all interesting subjects.
None of those cost money yet so few workplaces value them since disrespect, micromanagement, and industrial era style division of labor are addictions of the corporate management crowd. It's gospel to Ivy League educated and Old Money.
As a separate issue, "As startups, we can't really offer top-dollar salaries to our employees." is complete nonsense. First of all, "we don't pay top dollar" is doublespeak for "We pay below market rate." Nothing says "We don't respect you." as much as that does. If you can't at the absolute minimum pay market rate for the level of talent you require you shouldn't be in business. End of story.
The crazy people are the ones that won't push back at a certain point of provocation. You hear about these women that stay with abusive spouses that beat them instead of leaving or killing the guy? They are nuts to put up with it, that's the crazy group.
By the way, a very Happy 9/11 Day to you. Speaking of which, I doubt it's escaped anyone's notice that it's perfectly OK for the US to use guns to mass slaughter people when it is ticked off about stuff that someone loosely related to them may or may not have done.
Hey why shouldn't it be OK for everyone then. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
I used to say native applications were the only way to do a lot of things like photo editing. Since then I have been proven wrong in finding photo editing and even audio production tools running in web browsers. Not the highest end stuff, but useful enough. Javascript has come a long way and Canvas really reorganizes the playing field.
The thing I am realizing is both Apple and Microsoft have extremely unstable APIs that are driven by political or maybe stupidity purposes (some non-engineering reason), where perfectly good software just stops working because some bureaucrat at the Duopoly decided to nix something for arbitrary or foolish reasons.
But you can't do this with HTML apps, since it's not a monopoly, duopoly, or oligarchy, it's an actual competitive market for browsers. If your browser decides to stop supporting HTML4, it's broken and no one will use it.
This means you can write once for web apps and be confident it will continue to work forever.
That's a huge advantage and has changed the way I think about things. Now I am of the opinion that if there is any possible way to make something run in the browser, that is the preferred and superior choice. It's also instantly Mac/PC and Linux cross compatible too.
"Only people whose sick leave exceeded 2 standard deviation were notified"
I don't understand what notified means? Notified of termination? So each year the company measured which people had the most sick days, which would of course be those dealing with cancer treatments as such, and fired them? IF so, it is reminiscent of Jack Welch's notorious dictat to fire the 10% "at the bottom" each year.
No doubt I am misunderstanding the policy you are describing, which is why I am asking for clarification.
For those that work, they do go mad. Haven't you noticed that Americans are obese drug addicts with little knowledge of world culture, don't speak any other languages at all, and love to declare war or otherwise bully anyone they can while shouting rah rah patriot freedom? That is part of what happens from never being able to take a month of vacation, which means no long trips to europe or south america or africa or anywhere really other than across the state line to the indian casino for a few days of gambling and buffet eats.
All right, perhaps not every one would go mad. There's quite a few jobs especially in bureaucracies like government and banks where work is a social club where they chat and drink coffee all day. These people probably don't need a vacation, but they are the ones where there is no problem for them to take it since they weren't contributing much in the first place.
It's the productive people that get backtalk from managements about vacation: "You can't go, we are in a crunch."; "This is a crisis, where is the team spirit."; "I can't believe you are considering taking 5 days off this year when things are the way they have been lately."
I am a designer, engineer and entrepreneur, but I have also taught high school in the past.
As an engineer, I would not consider working for a place that had a problem with less than 4 weeks vacation. It is absolutely necessary to have that as a minimum to recharge and do a great job. If I'm not allowed to do what I need to to do a great job, I don't want the job, I tell people to give it to some lackey instead and just be comfortable with their full on corporate BS environment.
I think that the extremely lengthy vacations should be taken into consideration when discussing teacher pay issues. It's relevant since a lot of teachers take part time jobs in the summer, something 12 and 11 month workers can't do. Some even write books and generate additional income that way, and recognized copyright case law in the US has the cool exception that books written by full time academics are not work for hire by their bosses. That's not the case for those of us in engineering where companies try to grab all they can.
Teaching high school in the US is extremely emotionally exhausting. You're expected to be a social worker and you deal with people with problems, yet you have little training and no support or back up or authority for dealing with this. When I was a teacher, if I did not have the entire summer off, I would have gotten a gun and come in and shot the entire administration. Not because I am crazy, I've had a psych eval for security clearance and am completely stable. It's just how close to breaking being a teacher in the US will drive you. The system is incredibly dysfunctional. Work stress is comparable to being a soldier on the front line. Most teachers are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. I am not surprised when I hear of so many female teachers having sex with their students - that is not because they are pedos, it is a stress response from having a total emotional breakdown from working in a horrific system.
If the 3 months of vacation time was removed from US schools, we would see a wave of teacher led psychotic breakdowns, suicides and massacres that would be so legendary they would be spoken of 1000 years from now.
This is the exact reason why these policies claim there is no specific time. No allocated days legally means zero days. Companies use this "flexible vacation" policy specifically so they don't have to comply with pay out in jurisdictions such as California. It's a big scam, which is why the real question to ask and answer is how many days on average are taken, and if they include "half days" as "vacation time" in the response, they are being intentionally highly misleading. Working half days is NOT vacation. It's work.
Absolutely so. I've seen this policy many times and it always results in less vacation around. Not only that but in his very post linked to he makes clear that he considers a proper 6 week vacation (I take off August like most civilized people do, and I take off a bit more at other times) is unacceptable because they are tracking a metric called "pace" that proper vacations would interfere with. He then suggests that what they really prefer is that you work at least half time (possibly this is 8 hrs a day instead of 16?) remotely from wherever you are taking your "vacation". Um, that's not a vacation. Vacation is no contact whatsoever with work, otherwise you are not recharging at all. There is no such thing as vacationing half time. That is working half time, not vacationing.
This same thing happened to me when I was a wee lad. I then personally ordered and paid for a few pizzas, breadsticks, root beer, a greek salad, about $50 all together, and hosted a pizza party myself at work late at night. To get your slice I just had you sign a petition against unpaid overtime and interest in joining the Teamsters Union. A couple guys didn't want to sign, the others did. A few weeks later I was fired with cause, had a better paying job by the end of the week. Company folded around a year later. And good.