@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Drinking:

@travisdh1 that's REAL Pilsner Urquel!

Wait, did America steal Pilsner Urquel as well as Budweiser?

Our local micro-brewery now does deliveries of cask ale. One of the brewers just dropped off 3 litres on the way home from her shift. So I'm fairly happy again, after all the pubs/bars have been closed here in England since March.

@Dashrender said in Microsoft Teams:

Thanks for this post - my early googles didn't land me on anything, but this morning got lucky.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/change-participant-settings-for-a-teams-meeting-53261366-dbd5-45f9-aae9-a70e6354f88e?ui=en-us&rs=en-us&ad=us

A good example of what's wrong with Teams. It's so complicated that even someone like you can't always figure it out. Bob the Sales Manager has no chance.

I've never understood how Microsoft manage to make products so convoluted. Then someone like Zoom comes along and shows how simple things can be.

Like I said above, he likes programming Python, nothing to do with gaming.

Thanks, he's going to take a look at solarus. He does like 2D, he loves Terraria.

His favourite game is Dota 2. He wants to become a developer, so anything that will teach him to code is great, but he's also studying art, so anything that helps develop his art skills is also educational. I'm trying to find something that he can get in to whilst stuck at home, but will also help him educationally.

Keep the suggestions coming please.

I'd like my 14-year old (a keen gamer) to develop a game, whilst he's off-school for the next few months. He's learnt some Python at school (which he enjoys), but that's it.

Can anyone recommend a good environment he can get into? Maybe something like Unreal Engine (first Google result). I'd like something that is quick and easy to get going ideally, as I'm having trouble inspiring him to give anything a go. As a kid, I loved writing games for my ZX Spectrum (in Basic, never got into Assembly). He's very artistic, so I'd like something that inspires him from a graphical design perspective.

Ideally, I'd love something that he could work on collaboratively online with his best mate.

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Installing a bath tub and working on system documentation.

Impressive multi-tasking there

@scottalanmiller said in Compare Azure to Windows On Prem for Normal Business Workloads:

Yes, it integrates with O365 which is nice, if you have O365 which they do with the customer that uses it. They don't like it, though. But they put up with it for the integration and price.

Integration with O365 is the only reason to use Teams IMO. But it is crap. I introduced it in our organisation and now most people hate me

However, Microsoft have spent a lot of money on slick TV adverts in the UK for it, so hopefully they'll invest in it and make it good.

We use it as a user-friendly front-end for Sharepoint, but I still end up opening Sharepoint if I want to do anything other than rudimentary document management, as Teams struggles.

We use it as a replacement for (consumer) Skype for messaging and screen sharing, but getting people to use it instead of Skype is a struggle. Skype is not great, but it's better. We use it for meetings, but free Zoom is much better.

I've never managed to get the calendar working correctly when organising Teams meetings. The chat is confusing, and we have lots of examples of people missing messages. To the extent that users sometimes send a Skype message that says "Did you get my Teams message?" Although I don't always get my Skype messages, so....

The embedded document editor is flaky, to the extent that I tell users to always select "Open in Desktop App" rather than "Edit in Teams".

I've tried using Microsoft Planner for project management (separate product but integrates nicely within Teams), but it's just not as good as the free version of Trello.

But, but, but.....I like the concept of a unified front-end interface to all our apps (Sharepoint, Planner, Word, IM etc etc), it's just not there yet. But it's still relatively new, and Microsoft have enough money to throw at it to make it work, eventually. I'm hoping my colleagues will eventually like me again

I'm all for flexible working, but wouldn't want a flexible salary. I get paid whether there's work or not. My bosses take my surplus labour (the revenue they earn from clients after paying my salary) as profit, but they also take the risk of not finding enough work.

I presume Jared's employee will be get extra compensation due to the risk he's taking on. But it wouldn't be for me. My bosses have an incentive to go and find work for me, because they don't have the option of not paying me. And finding work is something they're good at and I'm not (I'm not a salesman). I like that they do that and I like that they have an incentive to do it.

If I was going to take on risk in return for higher potential returns, then I would have started my own business, rather than being an employee.

But each to their own.

@JaredBusch said in Writing a Job Posting:

*We currently run on an hourly payment model. The time you bill to clients is what you are paid.
There is no vacation, but the hourly rate accounts for that. If you can't swing taking time off, it is your own fault.

Wow, seems like a tough gig.

@Jimmy9008 said in New IT Position UK, any advice/feedback?:

Competencies:
• Minimum eight (5) years’ experience within Information Technology

I might be wrong, but I'm not sure you're allowed to say this in the UK anymore, as it could be construed as age discrimination.

I was thinking of applying as I meet every criteria exactly, but then realised I wasn't a self-starter, so sadly will have to pass

I am surprised by the reaction on here. Maybe it's a cultural thing because it is so common and normal in Europe. Certainly over here you can't just fire people, as it is predicted will be the outcome in the OP's case.

@scottalanmiller said in How do you guys handle counter offers?:

2. We are saying that when people say it worked out, that's just something that people say but if you look at those situations, they have to lower the bar as to what "working out" means to make the claim.

By "lower the bar" you mean doing the same job but earning 50% more money. Yes, I think a lot of people would take that.

Anyway, it sounds like the OP handed in his notice and his employer is trying to persuade him to change his mind. That's not extortion. That's normal. It sounds like his mind is made up anyway, so fair play for sticking to his guns. I don't know if I would for that kind of money. I'd be tempted to stick around as I could then find another job if it didn't work out. But it is definitely not extortion.

I'm not recommending anyone takes a counter offer. I'm saying that there are occasions when it can work out. Calling people stupid when you don't know the circumstances is OTT.

@JaredBusch said in How do you guys handle counter offers?:

@Carnival-Boy said in How do you guys handle counter offers?:

I also don't agree with the negativity around counter offers. They can work out.

It can never work out unless the company is really that stupid.

Feels like anyone who doesn't conform to your world view must, therefore, be "stupid".

Maybe she just came up with a cunning excuse to avoid Scott? We’ve all been there!

You can get a dumb Nokia for, like, 20 bucks in Europe. I assume it's the same in the US. We have one that gets used everyone time a family member breaks their phone, which is quite regularly. It's also handy at festivals where you don't have to worry about theft or power to charge it (the battery lasts about a week!)

@magicmarker said in How do you guys handle counter offers?:

@JasGot Thank you for your insight.

My current employer left me as the sole IT department for 250 employees for over 10 years. I was doing help desk and project management. This was only ONE of the many factors I was looking for change. I believe the company never put a contingency plan in place if I were to leave, or get hit by a bus for that matter. When I put in my notice, they realized they had no job description for my title. I was asked to write a job description for them to use for recruitment. I was pretty shocked by that.

The company is simply trying to solve a problem now by countering and getting me to stay. They put themselves in a bind. HR mentioned that employees will want to leave if take another job. That is somewhat flattering, but what in the world does that say about the company then?

I think that's more common than you think.

I was a one man band for a few years and loved it. There's pros and cons with any job but I'm surprised by the negativity on here. My experience was generally positive.

I also don't agree with the negativity around counter offers. They can work out. You've ended up in a position where you are massively important to your employer and they have been forced to recognise that and they've responded in a positive way.

I don't buy the poisoned well argument. Not least because of the concept of confirmation bias. They would look back at the situation in a positive way rather than negative - "our employee is awesome and we expertly negotiated him to stay and averted a crisis". You might think they would then put in contingencies to dilute your importance (and maybe even fire you later) but companies are generally content to just kick the can down the road and carry on as if nothing happened. They might treat you with greater respect.

Ultimately you know what you want and you know your employer so none of us can say, I just think that staying "could" be good for you.

I've tried G Suite and struggled.

@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:

end users have the benefit of already knowing it (in most cases.)

This is a benefit for the owners to, as it reduces training costs, and increases productivity. I've been using Office for years and I'm still pretty rubbish with it (as in only using about 20% of its features), so moving to another office suite would almost certainly reduce my productivity, at least in the short term, whilst I had to learn how to use it.

Calculating the TCO of different suites is an impossible task, but I don't think one should assume that Office is the most expensive, just because it has the highest licencing costs.

Full disclosure, I work for a Microsoft partner, so I may not be entirely unbiased

@scottalanmiller said in Comparing Office Suites:

As an MSP, when we talk to customers about their options, costs, and whatever, we find that LibreOffice is the most commonly deployed because once management looks at its features, easy of use, low unnecessary change rate, near zero IT costs (it deploys to every platform via free repos, it's the most broadly available, lowest overhead of any product we've seen) they generally override individual objections to wanting to keep whatever their person and not personally paid for products.

MS Office is super common, and universally hated. Nearly every customer we have with it loathes it and whatever factors are leading them to use it prove to be a weak link in some other product's armor. This is so dramatic that I'm working with a team to make software for whom a major selling point is that it does not use or require MS Office. Most of our customers that use MS Office do so either because it is deeply entrenched from a time before organizational level planning was done and/or the existing files are so entrenched in their workflow that updating would be problematic.

Interesting. I've never come across an organisation that doesn't use Office. And I've never come across one that hates it. Sure, everyone swears at PowerPoint when it doesn't do what they want it to, and years ago I had a few people bemoaning replacing their beloved Lotus 123, but never "hate".

My biggest issue with using anything else would be compatibility, as Word, Excel and PowerPoint files are routinely shared across organisations. How do people deal with that?