I've noticed that too, a trend to work whenever, goof off whenever. I don't think we evolved to work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Farmers and hunter-gatherers certainly didn't.
Most jobs have responsibilities, like to see patients on schedule, or stand behind a cash register X hours a day. I couldn't do that.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
I reckon the trick is to find a job or situation in life that suits your personality, applies to everyone I guess ?
Sure, but I think there are more jobs around now that don't have hard-defined work hours. How the heck would labor laws or unions deal with jobs like that?
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Maximum number of work hours/minimum pay per hour in a one month (or whatever) period?
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
-- "it's the network..." "The Journey is the reward" speff@interlog.com Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com Embedded software/hardware/analog Info for designers: http://www.speff.com
There are overtime rules that require extra pay for any day over 8 hours. How do you count playing on the slide, or taking a nap?
I know a guy who codes for Facebook. They have occasional coding binges, when Zuckerberg shows up and they code all weekend.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Are there people who are affected by such rules who have this flexibility?
An hourly employee?
When I was contracting I worked 65-70hrs a week but they paid me - straight time for any hours under 168 per week (more would have pissed 'em off ;). It was a government job but it wasn't cost-plus.
So if the big boss shows up you have to play his game for the weekend, no matter what else you had planned?
If you say "gosh, I have prior commitments" does that get you labeled as "not a team player?"
8-hour workdays and 5-day workweeks are there to keep the boss from consuming your entire life. If there's some other way to do that -- great.-- Tim Wescott Wescott Design Services http://www.wescottdesign.com
More would have surprised anyone who realises there are ONLY 168 hours in a week.
I think the speaker missed his own point. Nobody with any intelligence can survive their entire life doing the same thing, every day, with the same people, every day. Unless one is immune to boredom, it will drive anyone nuts. Yet, that's the recommended lifestyle and job selection. Permit me to suggest an unconventional alternative.
Using myself as my favorite example, I'm considered a problem employee because I never do anything twice the same way. I'm always experimenting, trying to do things better, easier, cheaper, or with more explosive results. Employers don't want that. They want someone that's predictable, dedicated, not easily distracted, and generally reliable. I fail all these requirements. I've worked on a production line and lasted exactly one day.
Note that Nick Floyd was talking to an audience of programmers, who are generally considered nerds and binge workers[1]. Nothing is ever done in moderation, concentration on a single problem is required, and distractions, such as a normal family life, are considered fatal to work quality. A good book to read that details how it worked at Microsoft is "Show-Stopper" by G. Pascal Zachary, which is the story of how David Cutler brute forced NT through Microsoft and managed to burn out a few stellar programmers in the process. It was enough to convince me that programming was not going to be in my plans.
What I've done is a little of everything. Most of it revolves around repair, damage control, project salvage, forensic analysis, cleaning up someones mess, and whatever work I can get. This week, I'm moving big dish antennas. When asked "what am I doing?", I usually have to ask "this week?" The advantage of such variety is that I don't have to worry about becoming bored or separating my life from my work. My multiple work descriptions and possibly my multiple schizoid lives, are thoroughly mixed and inseparable. Separating my work from my personal life would require surgery. I am what I do.
I highly recommend this lifestyle, if you can do it. Most people can't primarily because they need a reliable and steady income to support a family and a mortgage. However, if you can live with the uncertainty, thrive on the doing something you know little about (i.e Learn by Destroying), and have a spouse that tolerates the unpredictable, it might work for you.
[1] How to recognize a programmer in a crowd. Ask everyone to count to ten. Normal people will start counting with one. Programmers will start with zero.-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
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As pointed out by some Economist: Usually, success at something continues that action at a time when one SHOULD be experimenting around for the times that action fails to bring results. AND...failure usually results in people doing the exact same thing, over and over, even when they continue to fail.
Like my father used to say, "Find something you like to do, and get paid for, and you'll NEVER have to work a day in your life."
octave programmers start at one.
Or BASIC. In QB, there's even a statement: OPTION BASE controls whether arrays are allocated starting at zero or one.
QB makes a real mess of indicies. Lots of plus and minus ones everywhere.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
Nobody forces you to use a negative index. PowerBasic lets you write bad programs if you want to, but it's not inherent.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Well, I wiped out their annual salary budget line in January. It took them weeks to figure out the error in their spreadsheet. ;-) Government contractor.
My first thoughts were, it takes the boss showing up to get serious about a project. ...or because the boss shows up you have to kiss his ass?
Probably. The rest of the team (not the boss) has set you up that way.
That's a good goal. Life doesn't always work that way, though. The bottom line is that, as free people (adults, presumably), if we don't like the situation we're in, we can change it.
Yet people do it. Some even figure out how to do it well. Some are even happy. Unbelievable, eh?
I'm the opposite. I look for ways of doing everything the same way, every time. It makes the mundane automatic so it doesn't take any of my energy.
I can't imagine why employers would want someone who's reliable, dedicated, and not easily distracted?! The gall!
Not programming for M$, anyway. The world isn't all like that.
I've been in some phase of design for forty years. Works for me. Plenty of variety with enough repetition to get it done right (even if that isn't the original intention ;).
What works for one doesn't work for all, fortunately. I'd rather not spend a life cleaning up other's messes.
...and count eleven objects? ...or three? ...or nine? Seventeen, anyone?
Jeff,
I think I'm in general agreement with the sentiment I think you're trying to express. Speaking for myself, I do tend to get bored more easily than some people I've worked with, at the places I have worked, but somehow I've kept it from driving me nuts. ( Anyway, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. )
On the other hand, I know a number of people who I consider at least moderately intelligent and who _do_ manage to do work that -- to me -- appears horribly boring and which I _think_ -- though I have no strong urge to test this -- might drive _me_ crazy.
I think that at least part of my problem lies in the phrase "doing the same thing, every day, with the same people, every day": I think that the criteria for judging "sameness" are different for different people, even in what might appear to be the "same" situation. I, for example, might find sitting around a lot and occasionally swinging a stick of wood or catching and tossing a ball extremely boring, yet many (most? ) presumably intelligent professional baseball players manage to find fulfillment in it rather than going nuts.
I'm _guessing_ that a Major Leaguer doesn't "see" one baseball game as being largely the "same" as the next, that, for them -- but not for me each game offers a variety of experience that completely escapes my senses. Does this mean that he/she/it is less "intelligent" than I am? Or simply that they "see" the world through a different set of perceptions? Likewise for, say, music: my niece Sophie can hear tonal differences that I apparently can't, and I suspect that practicing a musical instrument over and over again for someone who _can_ hear fine differences might not be as boring as it generally was for me.
Yet some people manage to work on an assembly line for years without going nuts. Are all, or even most, of them _necessarily_ less intelligent that you? Or is it that they see more of whatever kind of variety they are attuned to to let them continue working there?
Jes' curious...
Frank McKenney
--
So far as a thing is universal it is full of cosmic things. And so
far as a thing is universal it is full of comic things.
-- G.K. Chesterton / Spiritualism (1908)
"John Larkin" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...
^^^^
I didn't say PB.
Many of QB's (QBasic and QuickBasic) library functions start at 1, e.g., MID$. All the examples use, e.g., "FOR i = 1 TO 100: NEXT" -- counting numbers, inclusive.
When dealing with arrays alone, when possible, zero-base indicies are best, but the overall system isn't intended to "let you write [good] programs".
Fortunately, QB having been written back in 1985, it's passed into the irrelevance it deserves.
I don't know about PB specifically; I know FreeBASIC for instance contains full object oriented semantics. Unfortunately, it looks pasted on, giving ugly syntax on par with VBScript.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
If I want to do something 100 times, I usually count from 1 to 100. Seems logical to me. PB lets you count from anything to anything, fixed or float, any step size, up or down. PB has pointers too, but I don't use them: pointers are evil, which is why ADA doesn't have them.
PowerBasic, especially the Console Compiler, is a modern language and a seriously good compiler. I like it because it lets me do Windows engineering apps quickly, and makes a simple EXE file that doesn't need flakey runtimes or libraries or anything like that. It does graphics and TCP/IP and lots of other stuff natively, namely without addons or libraries. The string and file operations are great. I have run useful FOR loops at 100 MHz, and beat "optimized" c programs 3:1 on speed. It has good HELP, with examples, built-in, which is great for the occasional engineer-programmer.
It's certainly a nicer syntax than c or html. The TRY/CATCH thing is great.
What doesn't work very well is when a c programmer uses PowerBasic as if it was c.
PowerBasic:
RUGRAT looks at all the surface-mount resistors that we have in stock and finds pairs that hit a desired ratio. This has saved me days of calculating.
Bessie designs LC Bessel filters, also saves me a lot of time. I guess a lot of people use spreadsheets for this sort of thing. I'd rather write a program.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
Most people have repetitive jobs and seem to do OK. Chefs, construction, plumbers, government workers, sales people, teachers, lawyers, doctors, reps, farmers.
I'm always
I do different things, things different ways, just because I want to. Electronics is great because it keeps changing, new tricks and toys every week.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology Inc www.highlandtechnology.com jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com Precision electronic instrumentation Picosecond-resolution Digital Delay and Pulse generators Custom timing and laser controllers Photonics and fiberoptic TTL data links VME analog, thermocouple, LVDT, synchro, tachometer Multichannel arbitrary waveform generators
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