@Dashrender said:

As Scott mentioned some companies don't like to pay a nickle for time they don't see spent in person

Well, that's unfortunate. I used to be a consultant, so maybe I'm better at seeing things from both perspectives.

Often it is more productive for consultants to work on our stuff remotely, and I always encourage this. One of our consultants lives in India, so on-site work isn't an option. Working remotely gives them so much more flexibility. Others feel they can work better on-site because they don't have any distractions. It depends on the job to a degree. The main downside of remote working is probably that you don't get to chat and pick the brains of the consultants whilst they work.

With remoting, I suppose you also have to trust the consultants to charge you a fair rate based on the amount of actual work involved. But this is no different to letting employees work from home. I work hard on building good relations with a select group of consultants. There are times when they've quoted for an 8 hour job and it has taken 12 hours and they don't charge me anything extra. So if an 8 hour job only turns out to take 4 hours I'm delighted - it means the job went particularly well. I would never expect a refund or anything. Some times I'll get an on-site consultant to finish early in order to beat the rush hour traffic and then he'll log on from home and finish off the job. It's a win-win.

But generally I find the idea of a consultant getting in a car and driving 2 hours to my office through heavy traffic just to do an installation that he could do just as well sitting in his pyjamas at home is just insane. Then when they're waiting for a 2 hour download they could be walking their dog or playing with their kids instead of sitting in my office drinking my tea. That's what pisses me off. It is just so inefficient.

@scottalanmiller said:
[They] actually cried when they had to let me go

None of my previous employers have ever cried when I left

Maybe it was just their British reserve preventing it....

Good luck AJ

@IRJ said:

They also make sure to hop on over here whenever there is a negative AJ thread.

This is starting to sound like a declaration of war!

Happy belated birthday.

I don't see them a lot. I suspect it's a British vs American thing. We've only recently started calling each other by our first names rather than our surnames.

If you never take a sick day because you're not ill then that's cool. If you go to work sick and spread germs around your office then that is not cool. Sick people should stay away from me at work! I'll normally take a sick day, but still do a bit of work at home since I'm normally just about well enough to take my laptop into bed with me.

@thecreativeone91 said:

But, at home for example I have computers that have both commercial use licences because I own an LLC and do commercial paid work. but I also have home/personal use licences on the same systems. I can't use those to to commercial work but there's nothing limiting me from installing them on the same system.

Again, I'm no lawyer, but if I was I would argue that the jury has to decide if your PC is a business machine that you occasionally do private work on, or a private machine that you occasionally do business work on. If it is primarily a business machine, then I would argue that you can't install ANY software using a non-commercial licence, even if you only intend to use it for non-commercial work.

Otherwise, during a software audit, the auditor would have to prove that any software was actually being used for commercial purposes, which would be next to impossible, rather than only having to prove that software was installed on a business machine.

@thecreativeone91 said:

And that's illegal for copyrighted content. It makes those that pay, pay more due to loss of sales. Volume of sales decreases the price.

No, it's the opposite. Pirating reduces demand for paid content and lower demand lowers prices and reduces profits for the content providers. Look how the cost of CDs has plummeted since Napster was invented. Pirating largely influences the profits going into fat executives, not the price you and I pay. Think of BitTorrent as a competitor to Amazon and Napster - competition lowers prices, it doesn't increase them.

In economics terms, it's simple supply and demand.

Like Scott, I find being connected and knowing that nothing has gone wrong more relaxing than being disconnected and getting anxious over all the ways that disaster could have struck.

I get an e-mail from our Veeam server which tells me that the backups were a success. This normally arrives close to bed time, and seeing that e-mail header saying "[Success] 16 VMs" helps me get to sleep. I'm even thinking of changing the e-mail header so it says "Goodnight and sleep tight Carnival Boy xxxx".

Obviously, when it fails it's not so great. But if I worked in an environment where lots of bad things happened I might need to rethink my always connected attitude. In that environment I might need a disconnected holiday just to unwind.

However, whilst most colleagues know that if I'm on holiday I'd rather not be disturbed, there are a few now who phone and text me with minor shit. This is starting to wind me up. So I've decided to get a second phone and will only tell 3 trusted colleagues the number. So they know that if the shit hits the fan they can text me on this secret number and say "check your main phone!"

@thecreativeone91 said:

If you guys worked in production you'd think about it differently. People should be paid for the work they've done. Along with companies are allowed to make profits - that is what they are there for.

There may be some honourable exceptions, but generally companies will pay their workers the minimum they can get away with. I've never known a company go "Hey, our profits have increased, let's give everyone a pay rise". Apple has made billions in profits from selling content through iTunes, I don't see them paying their workers more than everyone else as a result.

I'm sorry but 20k per day is not normal, either for an SMB or for an enterprise. Claiming Google Apps is just a hobby/ home user system on the grounds that it struggles to process over 7 million e-mails per year for a single account is unfair.

@thecreativeone91 said:

What do you think about the article.

I hate it.

"At U.S. Robotics we had close to ten thousand employees and we didn't count personal days. We said "Take the days you need." There was a high level of trust. Here's how many employees misused their paid time off: zero. They didn't do it, because they were treated like adults."

I call bullshit on this statement. I guarantee that in any workplace of 10,000 people, many will take the piss. If you're a manager and you're not aware of this, it probably means you need to come down from your ivory tower from time to time.

The author's profile states "We're reinventing work so that it works for humans."
I translate that as "We're reinventing work so that I can make a fortune selling books and consulting"

I may be harsh on this person, but I'm pretty cyncial about all these "consultants" writing articles and selling books in a new-age, touchy-feely, American kind of way. Or maybe I'm just in a bad mood this morning

On not giving reference other than stating facts ("X worked here for N years and on a salary of Y"), this has been common practice now in the UK for years. I'm in favour of it. Old skool references were too subjective, and often reflected whether or not the manager likes the person rather than reflecting their ability. The danger was references could fall in to the territory of "I really liked this person because they are white, middle-class and liked a drink, just like me". I've managed competent people who I disliked, and incompetent people who I liked - there is a danger my cognitive biases could have influenced my reference writing in an unfair and unethical way. I'd rather not take the risk.

Labels are definitely much better than folders - essentially because you can have multiple labels attached to a single e-mail. After using labels, I find Outlook folders really suck and are a horribly dated concept.

Bill Gates didn't say those things. It was Charles Sykes from a book called Dumbing Down our Kids". I think most of it is bollocks, personally, but then I'm a bit of a left wing, bleeding heart liberal. It might be because I'm European

I like the name, at least.

"Hi! Did you get my e-mail?"
"Er...no"
"Really? I sent it last week!"
"Oh, ok. It's probably in my clutter folder"
"When do you read your clutter folder?"
"Christmas"

@scottalanmiller said:

I do agree with Rule 5 a lot. Flipping burgers (or similar, bagging groceries and making pizzas) were major growth things for me personally. Hated doing it, very glad that I did it.

What I disagree with is the suggestion that the younger generation think it is beneath their dignity. That's simply not been my experience. Of the resumes I've received recently from young people, pretty much all have worked in McDonalds or similar. It's normal now. I read the other day some stat that was something like half of all baristas in London have University degrees (I can't remember the exact stat). This would have been shocking in the sixties, but it's normal now. I think only the 1% super-rich who get an allowance from their parents are likely to turn their noses up at these kinds of jobs.

If anything, I'd say "your grandparents", who left school in the fifties and sixties during an economic boom and full employment, are more likely to think flipping burgers is beneath their dignity rather than the young generation who are leaving school in era of massive house prices, no job security and huge education fees and who simply need the cash to survive.

Yes, Dash, you are just like me (at least in that way )

They are rebranding Lync to SfB. Old, consumer Skype remains the old Skype and is a separate product. At least that's my understanding.

Forever. I'm trying to persuade my company to put some rules in place. In the meantime, I just keep installing bigger and bigger file servers.

On the other hand, we manufacture heaters that can have a life of over 40 years, so certain information needs to be kept forever.

It's a pretty shitty attitude to lose files and then expect the vendor to bail them out three years after the event though. Client files shouldn't be kept longer than strictly necessary. Companies need a defined retention policy.

@thecreativeone91 said:

But it means nothing in the grand scheme as you get no real proof of it.

I would give credit to job applicants who had done these courses, even if they didn't have a certificate. Sure, they could be lying about taking them, but I work on the basis that what people say in interviews or write on their resumes are true, unless proven otherwise.

EdX comes from MIT, so it has the pedigree. I think it's fantastic. Free, online eduction to anyone in the world from top Universities. It's genuinely revolutionary.

Worth looking at these major players as well:
https://www.udacity.com/
https://www.khanacademy.org/
https://www.coursera.org/