Buttons

How would you force someone to take time off?

If I was their boss I would say something like "you're job is to stay home and do anything besides work for the next week, you will still be paid for this time". Easy.

As for the on-call stuff. Yes, that's the point. It should be unsustainable for a company to continually rely on their daytime programmers for frequent on-call alert handling.

If off-hours issues happen often, the company can hire an additional team to handle off-hours issues. If off-hours issues are rare, then you can depend on your daytime programmers to handle the rare off-hours issue, and know that they will be fairly compensated for being woken up in the middle of the night.

I've been at too many companies where an off-hours alert wakes up a developer in the middle of the night and the next day the consensus is "that's not good, but we'll have to fix the underlying issue after we finish implementing the new UI the design team is excited about". It's not right for a developer to get woken up in the middle of the night, and then the company puts fixing that on the backburner.

I'll say it again. It's about aligning incentives. When things that are painful for the worker are also painful for the company, that is alignment. Unfortunately, most companies have the opposite of alignment, if a developer gets woken in the middle of the night the end result for the company is that they got some additional free labor, that's pain for the worker, reward for the company; that's wrong.

When I think of a tech worker union my thoughts first go to standardizing everyone's pay and limiting what I can earn myself. I've probably fallen to anti-union propaganda.

A tech worker union that says nothing about pay could still do so much.

A union could ensure that the company's incentives are aligned with worker's incentives around things like on-call.

I'd love a union that forced a company to give all on-call workers compensation. Something like:

1. If you're woken up in the middle of the night, you automatically get 8 hours comp time (time off), plus 2x the time you spend on-call during off hours.
2. Accrued comp time over 20 hours must be payed at 10x normal pay if the employee leaves the company for any reason. The idea here isn't for employees to accrue comp time, but to give the company a strong incentive to ensure employees use their comp time.

Basically, if a company is having lots of on-call alerts, or the company is preventing employees from using their comp time, you want this to be directly painful to the company. Incentives should be aligned, what is painful for the worker should be painful for the company.

Or, regarding "unlimited PTO". I'd love to see a union force companies to:

1. "Unlimited PTO" policies are fine, but they must have a guaranteed minimum amount of PTO specified in writing. So none of this "yeah, we heave 'unlimited PTO'; oh, we're really busy this quarter, so can you wait to take PTO until next quarter?".

Tech workers have it good compared to a lot of workers, but there are still plenty of abuses a union could help with, even if the union never even mentions pay.

What is the game? It's not being a shill to answer questions.

The reason why is that they need my email address?

Like anything medically related in the US, it's our time to crack open our wallets and do our patriotic duty of paying half the nation.

Like, if I want to talk to a doctor for 5 minutes, then it's my time to pay the all the insurance industry workers, and I have to pay my part of those 3 minutes long drug commercials you see on TV every ad break and before every YouTube video, and I have to pay all those people locking down the medical devices so that the users can't use their own data. This is my time to shine, I got to pay for all this because I talked to the doctor for 5 minutes. Also, hopefully in the end I have a few cents left over to give to the doctor.

Fucking rent seekers...

Look at the entire history.

In 2018 their stock price was about 24, now it's 2.

I haven't written any Java since Java 6. This makes me so happy to hear.

What about XML, and XML based configs? Is the Java ecosystem still obsessed with XML?

I remember I was once trying to learn Hibernate. After finding what I thought looked like the best tutorial, I skimmed through it and there was literally no Java code in the tutorial about a Java library! It was all XML! I never could understand it, but this was early in my career, maybe I could handle it now, maybe not.

I don't know. That's what I was saying. I can't possibly imagine what I could say to help someone understand that error message.

😉

If you can't understand that error message then I don't know what to tell you.

The rumored 4th and 5th games...

You guys had a house!?!

And I think their board is panicking trying to figure out how they can regain me, specifically, as a customer.

More seriously, I apparently am not the only one who eventually got their fill of Ubisoft games. I think Ubisoft has planted resentment in the minds of all their customers, and as soon as they slipped a little in game quality their customers were more than happy to leave, just for the sake of leaving.