I had the exact same experience, except that I had to do a self-review.
Preface:
In November of that year the org REALLY needed some important work done in a language that I didn't develop in. It was a super large update to a legacy PERL app that had NO TESTS WHATSOEVER. If it wasn't done by a deadline they would have lost their largest contract and very likely have been out of business. Did I mention that this org was part of a fortune 500 company?
Since I was the ONLY developer left at the company who had any idea how things worked they pleaded with me to help them. Sensing opportunity, I rose to the occasion for a month of 60 to 80 hour weeks.
I pulled off the release that would have been the nail in their coffin had it failed.
A couple of months later we had to do self-reviews. It was my first one because for an unknown reason I hadn't received one the year prior.
I was really proud that I'd pulled off the impossible so I gave myself a couple of fives in areas like "works hard" and "teamwork" or something.
Then I had my official review with the C level exec of development, since they still hadn't replaced the director who was my former manager.
He told me that we had to change the fives, because even though they existed the company felt you had to do something reeeeally awesome to get a five.
Then he said fours were not impossible to get, but almost impossible to get, and since he was too busy running the company to really give me a review he'd give me the benefit of a doubt and reset the fives to threes.
Next he knocked a couple of other stats down to twos, saying that I had too many threes.
Then, he said unfortunately my average score was pretty much dead on the company average and that I only qualified for an average 2% raise.
Aaaaand at that moment I realized that performance reviews were nothing more than a dog an pony show for HR to justify giving you a minimum raise, or documenting why you should be fired.
I also realized that there was absolutely no reason to break my neck for them again, and the only way I was gong to improve my situation was to find another job.
Which I did. Securing myself a 40% raise doing 1/2 the work in 25% of the knowledge domain.
I appreciate you and the other poster pointing out that long term benadryl use isn't good. I really wasn't aware of that.
I appreciate the marijuana suggestion too, but I find that I'm unable to sleep after partaking. I get intermittent erratic heartbeats that make it impossible
:(
Note: I pounded this out pretty quickly and don't have time to proofread. Sorry for any grammatical errors.
I will say some of these articles sometimes read satirically. Notably, they have a diagnosis for people who can't sleep at 'normal' hours: Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.
I have been struggling with being unable to sleep during normal hours my entire life. My parents would yank the covers off of me in the morning, or maybe my mother would start vacuuming my room at 8 AM frustrated that I wasn't already up. All through my school years, from elementary to HS I was barely functional. I was often late or missed the bus because I was a walking zombie, struggling to get dressed and out of the house without falling asleep.
Keep in mind that I'm 45, none of this was due to too much TV time or smart phone use. (One TV in the house, no such thing as notebooks, ipads, or smart phones back then).
No matter how much I struggled through the day to just stay awake, and how much I was looking forward to going to bed that night, at 9 PM I would be fully awake. I laid in bed night after night watching the click tick by as I tried to unsuccessfully "just go to sleep". Then, when my alarm went off I'd be exhausted again and struggle to get up and out the door. I was a terrible student to say the least.
You're told for years that you're lazy, unmotivated, a slacker, etc.
During my High School summers, I would get into a pattern of going to sleep at between 3 and 6 AM, waking at noon. I was a fully functioning human being. I had the most creative and productive days (evenings) of my life as an artist. I was naturally alert and creative Ispent the wee hours of the morning drawing, painting, reading.
Then I'd be plunged back into misery when the school year began. I once again drove my teachers crazy. I got in trouble for falling asleep in class. I was told again that I was a lazy slacker. I don't know how many times I was spoken to by faculty about not living up to my potential.
When you're told your whole life that you're only problem is that you're lazy, and you can't figure out why you can't find the motivation to do the things you want to do, you start to believe it.
After HS, I had a few menial jobs, stumbling into one where I worked from 8 PM to 4 AM. It was great, except for the fact that my mother still harassed my by trying to wake me up at 9 AM because... I don't know. I guess she just didn't want some lazy slacker sleeping the day away?
Later I worked my way into tech and had jobs requiring normal office hours. I was self medicating by drinking most nights, trying to get to sleep to maintain a normal-ish schedule. It didn't work all that well.
I was working at a company as a technical lead that I'd help get up and running with a couple of friends from school, and even though we were supposed to be "flex" hours, not surprisingly the morning people kept setting up 8 AM meetings that I was almost always late for and sometimes missed.
Out of frustration I spoke to my Dr about it, and he sent me to a a medical sleep center. I had a couple of sleep studies done, electrodes glued to my head and all that. The Dr told me I had DSPS, something I'd never heard of, nor sought a diagnosis of. This was roughly 20 years ago. I looked it up, and found that it was a real thing.
So, I told my friends that I'd started that company with what was up... I had thing thing called "DSPS" and what it was, how it worked and all that.
And I'll never forget how my best friend looked me square in the eye and told me he basically had lost all respect for me, for coming to them with some kind of bullshit made up medical diagnosis, trying to excuse my inability to keep the same schedule as everybody else. The relationship between the two of us quickly went down hill.
I spent some time after that out of tech, working jobs that were more amenable to later hours. For the last 6 I've been back in it, and it's still a frustrating struggle to stay on "normal" hours. In an effort to go to sleep when I should, I take benadryl and melatonin almost every night. Sometimes it works, sometimes it seems to have no effect.
I know that I'm not as effective at my job as I could be, my mind is often in a fog during the day. And again... I spend the whole day looking forward to climbing into bed at 9 PM to get a good night's rest, only to have my brain begin firing on all cylinders that night. I get tremendously motivated to do all of the things I was too tired to accomplish all day, and I have to try to shut it down by taking that benadryl and melatonin cocktail so I don't stay up all night. Then I get into bed and toss and turn, unable to sleep usually until 1 or 2 AM.
My paternal grandmother had it. I have it. One of my four children has it.
The article linked to here says that genetic mutations have been found that are linked to it.
And still, you make a comment illustrating society's skeptical attitude toward DSPS. You obviously don't believe that it's real.
That's what we deal with, and I don't expect that it will change any time soon.
Netflix approached the Hollywood studios to license their content for streaming, and Hollywood snickered and took the easy money. They expected it to be a total failure on Netflix's end.
Then, when Netflix started growing like crazy and the studios panicked. If Netflix was the only streaming service around, it would enable them to dictate licensing contracts. Suddenly, streaming was a real thing and they wanted to extract every cent possible from their content.
In order to slow Netflix down the studios pulled the majority of the "good" content from Netflix, and kept licensing them their b-movies and documentaries. To this day, you still don't see a whole lot of blockbusters or theatrical releases available on Netflix.
Netflix knew that they couldn't remain at the mercy of the content owners. So they leveraged their head start on content delivery by producing their OWN content only available through themselves.
It was a brilliant strategy, and I'm sure it took a lot of cajones to go down that path.
People REALLY like high quality pictures of attractive, naked people. What should we use as a reference image to judge how well compression algorithms reproduce an image?
Hmm... how about a SFW version of what the compression algorithm in question is going to be applied to. Over, and over, and over, and over again?
Perhaps this went completely over my head somehow?
I'm not seeing why this is needed, other than people who find comfort in static typing think Ruby is broken without it.
I've been programming with Ruby every day for 5+ years, and it performs and debugs just fine without static typing.
My summary opinion is if static typing makes you happy go for it. Please don't try to force it into Ruby as a feature of the language, however, as it's current model of dynamic typing is one of it's best features.
I think the comment was meant to draw attention to today's societal programming. It seems very likely that if a woman were to say the same thing one might be inclined to view it as an example her internalized misogyny and symptom of the systematic oppression of women in general, rather than a human being who derived satisfaction from keeping their living space tidy.
I was married to a woman who (after marriage) was diagnosed with a personality disorder. Reading this article was like a look back into my marriage.
I was always being told about everything I did that failed to meet her standards, or failed to do at all, and how it was because I didn't care about her enough to do it the way she wanted it done.
Then, when I'd try to do things in anticipation of her ever changing priorities, or to offload things from her plate I'd be read the riot act. Clearly it wasn't because I was trying to be considerate and meet her ever changing standards. I was obviously because I was criticizing her in some kind of chauvinistic way, or undermining her position in the household.
I'm very happy to be out of that situation, and I completely agree that normalizing this type of behavior is ridiculous.