Octopus Overlords

Hold up a sec...you still have those lycra bike shorts? If so, what are your Shimmy rates?

One for every day of the week and two for Sunday, but use is strictly limited to non-frigid months because they don't fit so when, you know, it shrinks.

Jeff V wrote: It should be noted I've never published or even edited a work of fiction although I've studied the subject (fiction writing) somewhat. Some of the stylistic issues are the same between fiction and non-fiction, however.

No worries and I only ask because you've done some writing for pay where actual editors ripped it apart (so presumably you learned something) and you wrote the notes to help make the novel better, as you see it.

So I'm curious.

Don't waste any time trying to track them down. It was only a passing request because you piqued my interest. It's not worth the effort (just for me. Others might be more interested).

Probably of more interest would be an article I had edited that was submitted by someone who had published a number of novels, some even best-sellers. The original submission was quite bad (given the guy's reputation, I was looking forward to something excellent). I was half-expecting a Mark Twain-like "how dare you presume to edit ME...do you know who I am?" response (especially when I suggested he read our Writer's Guidelines), but instead got a very nice, cooperative reply. I'd have to see if I have any emails from a long-dead account that has the exchange, but I might be able to find the original marked up document.

I'm a level 1 team lead and I've encountered a high level monster of a coworker, likely lawful evil.

Quick conversation:
"The project is in crisis and I asked you to help get something done by Monday."

"Yes, and I said I can"

"Well, why wasn't it done?"

"I said I can, not that I will."

You can imagine how things have gone since then....

So depressing.

God, that's one of my coworker in a nutshell. Unless you use very precise language, and only words that he himself would use, he will find a way to get around your request or question on a technicality every time.

I assume your co-worker is productive though.

The Meal wrote:I have a tenuous position as a design engineer in a field which promises to go the way of the buggy whip. It's a matter of how soon. Fortunately for me, I'm a highly-paid buggy whip designer, so it's hard to leave on my own free will...

Nearly four years ago my current company announced a merger with one of the other big players in the field. However, one of our competitors at the time had recently picked up a smaller player, and shortly thereafter, China realized they failed to flex their authority in the process of allowing that merger to come to fruition. Not so with my company's deal, and it took the greater part of three years before it was consummated. (Business-wise, it's sort of a fascinating story, though I'm in no particular mood to go into it.)

As the deal has finalized, the past few months have seen the top levels of the new, merged organization get announced. And it's been a bloodbath for my (legacy) company executive management. This doesn't tend to bode well for folks who were currently under that old organization. I work in a small group at a satellite office to a satellite office of our former mothership, and recent product roadmap adjustments have left my team with development of a product with no practical future follow-on work.

In other words, it looks like my own free will is about to be taken out of the equation. (Official news to arrive possibly as soon as next month, but it's been promised that we'll hear no later than the conclusion of the first round of the NHL playoffs.)

Change has always treated me well, so I'm not particularly concerned. I'm still young enough and expect to interview well enough that I expect to find a soft landing spot. In some sense it will be a relief to finally start writing pages in the next volume of whatever my career will become.

In working on this end-of-platform product, I've been under the gun to an absurd amount for the past few months. That hasn't changed, though this week, with the exiting-stage-left of some principal players at the satellite office to which we report, there has been some very fishy (seemingly malicious) breakdown of our online tools required to complete our jobs. Email systems are down. License servers for nearly every one of our (non-Office) tools are broken. This began last Tuesday afternoon and promises to continue to be our reality until next Tuesday. In an industry where every day a product schedule slips is measured in seven digits to the corporate bottom line, this is rather devastating. The workload piles up behind a dam and it's going to be (extra) ugly when that sucker breaks free...

hepcat wrote:God, that's one of my coworker in a nutshell. Unless you use very precise language, and only words that he himself would use, he will find a way to get around your request or question on a technicality every time.

One of the "competencies" that we are rated on includes "Do the right thing" and it's there precisely to handle people like this. They only stay if their management is the same. Everyone is expendable.

The Meal wrote:In some sense it will be a relief to finally start writing pages in the next volume of whatever my career will become.

Just wondering...after so many years in hard drive design, if that field is drying up, what sort of work do you anticipate transitioning to? I have a few friends who were specialized engineers in fields that dried up (one, CRTs with Zenith, the other, teflon). Both of them had some troubles moving on, the Zenith guy went through a variety of different companies and is now with Navistar. The teflon guy hasn't worked as an engineer in 10 years (but that's more on him, I don't think he even looked outside of his niche). I'm just curious how you take a specialized skillset and parlay it into a new gig without having to take a step backwards in career progression.

I just built a PC with the only spinning bits being the fans for the first time ever. Sorry Meal.

coopasonic wrote:I just built a PC with the only spinning bits being the fans for the first time ever. Sorry Meal.

While I the speed of the SSD, I am terrified of the consequences when the first of my SSDs fail. I think in my years of support, I've had three failures of HDD that did not an adequate recent back up. In all three cases, I was able to find a paid for solution for under $100 to extract the data I need. It is unclear how much or how reliable SSD data recovery is. Everything I read says it's not something you do in house.

But man, I just imaged an SSD this week with files over a cat 6 gigabit network and moving 100s of megs of 1000s of files was happening in like two or three seconds. It was beautiful.

Kind of drifting off topic, but last I checked, the failure rates of SSDs were a lot lower than that of spinning disks. At work, a drive failure usually means the user is fucked, since it's encrypted. We had a brief fling with self-encrypting drives and they actually made it worse. Since moving to SSDs, I don't think we've had a single one fail (we deployed about 300 SEDs in my building and were experiencing a 10% failure rate after 3 months. Eventually, I stopped sending them back to the manufacturer for replacement since nobody wanted to use them anymore).

My personal policy of upgrading drives every 2-3 years is still pretty sound. I haven't had any personal data loss since I had 2 Deathstar drives go tits up on the same day. There is no reason I shouldn't keep backups of my data on the cloud, however, at which point upgrading drives so often will no longer be necessary, I'll only be risking the inconvenience of reinstalling everything (which, thanks to Steam and Office 365, is a very minor inconvenience).

Jeff V wrote:Kind of drifting off topic, but last I checked, the failure rates of SSDs were a lot lower than that of spinning disks.

Not from what I read and I read it on the Internet so it must be true!

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/data-recovered-failed-ssd/

(Where in the link to sites like Tom's Hardware)

Jeff V wrote:Just wondering...after so many years in hard drive design, if that field is drying up, what sort of work do you anticipate transitioning to?

An important question to be sure. And one I'm working actively in my conscious mind and have my subconscious working on as well. And a question which leads to many other life-related questions (such as willingness to relocate geographically). Partially due to uncertainty, and lots because I don't want to air personal business which affects my family prior to hashing it out with them first, I don't want to give too detailed an answer. The reality is: it's up in the air. I hope that my shift from a very specialized analyst (see the second post in this thread) to a more general design engineer will afford me opportunities across industries. Some industries (high volume consumer electronics) would see an easier transition than others.

I'm just curious how you take a specialized skillset and parlay it into a new gig without having to take a step backwards in career progression.

I wouldn't characterize success by avoiding a backwards step in the career (I expect some amount of lowering on the totem pole), but I also expect an easy time of selling my current body of work as relevant to many other fields. Having a 1:1 correlation to their industry would always be an easier sell than bringing an outsider perspective, but that will be the tact handed to me. (Either that or copious résumé fabrications!)

coopasonic wrote:I just built a PC with the only spinning bits being the fans for the first time ever. Sorry Meal.

Between work and home, I have four such devices. Two in a desktop and one each in separate laptops. Apology not accepted.

My next rig will still have spinny bits.

I suppose someone has current stats handy, the last I saw though had MTBF at 5 years for mechanical disks and 7 years for SSDs. In any case, as has been since the dawn of time, saving your only copy of that important document or irreplaceable family vacation photos on a single point of failure is a very bad idea. Tools exist now for backing up such things silently and seamlessly to the cloud. My pictures automatically are backed up by Google or Dropbox. Documents are synced with One
Drive. Multiple copies exist of my MP3 library, with about half of it on the cloud (damn Google and their measly 25,000 song limit!) I don't really fear data loss any longer, and the performance of an SSD trumps any recovery concerns since I never have and never will pay for data recovery.

Jeff V wrote:

The Meal wrote:In some sense it will be a relief to finally start writing pages in the next volume of whatever my career will become.

Just wondering...after so many years in hard drive design, if that field is drying up, what sort of work do you anticipate transitioning to?

my dad worked for Seagate, and was laid off with about half the office in 2009. Since he was 59 years old at that time and had been with the 'same' company (through two buyouts/acquisitions) for the past ~30 years, new jobs did not come his way (the few opportunities he looked at afterwards didn't work out, he decided he didn't want to go back to school after a quarter at the community college, and both parents were not wililng to relocate, since mom still had a job). he's _officially_ retired now and collecting Social Security, but i still don't think he's gotten over it.

he had talked in earlier years about doing a part time job at Home Depot after retirement, but reality has shown he'd much rather not work for anyone anymore.

The Meal wrote:

I'm just curious how you take a specialized skillset and parlay it into a new gig without having to take a step backwards in career progression.

I wouldn't characterize success by avoiding a backwards step in the career (I expect some amount of lowering on the totem pole), but I also expect an easy time of selling my current body of work as relevant to many other fields. Having a 1:1 correlation to their industry would always be an easier sell than bringing an outsider perspective, but that will be the tact handed to me. (Either that or copious résumé fabrications!)

At this point in your career, you might consider taking your talents to the management level. In management, you don't typically make much use of detailed technical knowledge, but level a much broader technological base. While a lot of the work I do is pixel-pushing, I don't have to spend a lot of time and energy staying on the cutting edge of technology skill-wise. A higher level of understanding usually will suffice; it's a level easier to maintain and less vertically-attached to given industry.

Jeff V wrote:The Meal might not be completely obsolete just yet...

I'd say we started reacting to this sort of feedback 24-18 months ago. Nothing new (to me) here (other than encouragement for my own personal non-obsolescence).

The Meal wrote:

Jeff V wrote:The Meal might not be completely obsolete just yet...

I'd say we started reacting to this sort of feedback 24-18 months ago. Nothing new (to me) here (other than encouragement for my own personal non-obsolescence).

Is it going to happen though? It seems like a promising thing that Google is advocating this development for the larger cloud-services industry and not necessarily their own particular interests (which, as the article suggests, they could conscript for their own purposes given their size).

Jeff V wrote:

The Meal wrote:

Jeff V wrote:The Meal might not be completely obsolete just yet...

I'd say we started reacting to this sort of feedback 24-18 months ago. Nothing new (to me) here (other than encouragement for my own personal non-obsolescence).

Is it going to happen though? It seems like a promising thing that Google is advocating this development for the larger cloud-services industry and not necessarily their own particular interests (which, as the article suggests, they could conscript for their own purposes given their size).

But that makes sense because one way or another, the files are stored SOMEWHERE - and it's not in thin air. Behind all the fancy "cloud" talk there are very solid moving parts. Someone still has to make them.

I went from being not busy and worried about job security to being in charge of WAYYYYY too much in the span of 2-3 months. On top of managing a few clients I'm also now the release coordinator for every single consumer goods client we have. Which is batshit insane as some of our clients are global. Which means there's 0 days/0 hours where someone doesn't want something.

Jeff V wrote:

The Meal wrote:

Jeff V wrote:The Meal might not be completely obsolete just yet...

I'd say we started reacting to this sort of feedback 24-18 months ago. Nothing new (to me) here (other than encouragement for my own personal non-obsolescence).

Is it going to happen though? It seems like a promising thing that Google is advocating this development for the larger cloud-services industry and not necessarily their own particular interests (which, as the article suggests, they could conscript for their own purposes given their size).

Aspects of the article are sort of a joke. When it says to eschew the current 3.5" form factor but then emphasizes the total cost of ownership -- okay. Total costs include cooling and (especially) power. The 3.5" form factor is pretty sweet for such things. (I won't publically comment on growing the height of units in the 2.5" and 3.5" form factors.) When the article talks about giving up some aspects of reliability for higher IOPS/Gb -- okay, that's nice — but it's tough to put myself in a position where such a trade off would occur with any sense of reality (certainly not mechanically, but maybe in the seamy underworld of "747 curves" and Bit Error Rates...).

If "Is it going to happen" means that products will be developed specifically addressing cloud storage, then the answer is yes. If the question is "Does this article represent the Rosetta Stone for HDD manufacturers to generate more profits," then the answer is either a flat "no" or possibly an "accidentally yes with severe reservations."

There has never been a year with more significant technology additions to HDD products than 2015. And it's going to be superseded yet again 2016, and forecasting technology for 2017 certainly looks like those additions are going to be geometrically larger. But as my company has (lamentably) driven the industry, they're going to be doing much more with much less.

Passed over for a promotion again. Had the worst review I've had in about 5 years (by bad I mean it was a high meets instead of an exceeds.)

Was told that if I could "prove myself" they would put me in for a mid-year promotion. And proving myself means keeping our current MDM/MAM solution afloat with sub-par engineers (and trying to get a new environment built for an upgrade), while building and testing Microsoft's Intune solution to see if it would be a good replacement.

So. Yeah.

hentzau wrote:Passed over for a promotion again. Had the worst review I've had in about 5 years (by bad I mean it was a high meets instead of an exceeds.)

Was told that if I could "prove myself" they would put me in for a mid-year promotion. And proving myself means keeping our current MDM/MAM solution afloat with sub-par engineers (and trying to get a new environment built for an upgrade), while building and testing Microsoft's Intune solution to see if it would be a good replacement.
So. Yeah.

That right there is why I don't expect (or at least hope not) to ever hold a "regular" job again. If I were to exceed expectations for a long period and be told to "prove myself" after 1 high meets review, i'd tell them that i've already proven myself the last 4 years and to shove their review where the sun don't shine.

Right now, I'm at a hotel in Silicon Valley and I have a job interview in the morning. Wasn't LOOKING for a new job, which should be obvious given that we've been in a new house for less than a month... but it turns out there's one looking for me. If I pass the interview (not worried) and they make the right offer (skeptical, you guys seen housing prices up here? but it's definitely possible) we're in.

It's 12AM and I'm waiting for India to finish a release. They were supposed to start at 8PM EST and it should have taken 3 hours. Checked at 10PM and they said it was in progress... Checked ETA at 11PM and they said 2 hours to complete.. HMMMMMMMMMMM asshats....

Just finished and they totally ignored my question about if they were having issues. They also replied to an earlier email to say it was complete. Dorks... I emailed their boss. If they had just said sorry we started late I wouldn't have even cared. We all make mistakes...

The answer, as of today (after 4 years of digging in) is: WELL. Things are really great.

I'm kind of in an odd place. I've always joked that I have climbed up from the mailroom - I work at a private university and I started as an admin assistant. 17 years later (Jul 2014), I'm the lead web developer for my school and generally enjoying life. My new boss has been brought in from the outside. Fantastically smart, looking to get out of the heavy hours of a design agency life, and looking to help us evolve into a better marketing group. She emphasized having fun as a team and being happy as individuals, which led to fantastic team productivity. She was the best boss I ever had. Emphasis on the word "was".

The head of my department, despite being the one to hire my boss, also felt extremely threatened. Not sure why, as my boss had no ambitions at this point in her career. Just wanted to make the school a better place. But that meant lots of big ideas and changes. In theory, I was told she was originally hired to bring in that change. But I guess the head of the department didn't really want that change...or at least not when it came from my boss. So 1 year after she was hired, my boss quit and went on to an even better job. I ended up getting promoted.

This was a jump from individual contributor to director level, which is basically two large jumps. It came with a substantial pay raise (for the university system) and it also came with a lot of stress. For many months, I wasn't even sure I could do the job, much less do the job decently. I'm at least at the moment, surviving. And 10 years of working with the head of the department means I have a lot of experience with managing upward and keeping her under control. But comparing myself to my old boss, I feel like I'm constantly falling short. That's probably not fair to me, as she had years and years experience as a project manager and team head...but I still feel that way anyway. If I can't do this job well, is it because the Peter Principle has kicked in or is it the unique dysfunction of my own department?

So, for right now, just working on surviving and using the raise to pay down debt to give myself financial freedom when/if the time comes to move on. This is complicated by the fact that the university will pay for 4 years of my daughter's college education. Basically I'll get 75% of what the university's tuition costs are to send her anywhere she wants to go. That's potentially worth close to $160K. My daughter is 13. Every year that I stay here makes it harder for any new job to make up for that loss. I'm not sure what my escape plan is if I decide that it's not working.

I've been here almost 20 years. I have at least another 15 to go before retirement. Definitely a situation I never expected to be in. At least the title looks good on my resume.

Malificent,
Do you feel you can contact your old boss? I'm sure they'll have some advice for you on how to improve. Does your new boss want you to keep the status quo or make changes? Did the old boss just make changes or did they discuss them with your current boss and make a decision together?

That's similar to the situation I'm in. Been at this college for 12 years. I have a 13 year old who is going to school in 5 years and an 11 year old in 7. Their tuition is fully paid if they go here and 80-100% if they go to another of about 130 private colleges. I've generally liked my job. It's still okay. Benefits are great. I have a new boss who is flexible and easy to work for. The problem is I'm beginning to dislike the work (not sure if it's general IT or just IT here). Its not difficult work for me but I don't enjoy it any more. It's mostly project management.

I've thought a lot about going back into teaching (I have a teaching license) but it would be a sizable pay cut and I'd lose the tuition remission that I currently have. I think I'd like teaching a lot more (I do some computer education and coaching and I definitely enjoy that). Actually, I know I"d like teaching. I had planned on teaching all through school but I fell into a tech job and have been there since. I've always kind of regretted that.

It would also mean I no longer have to drag details out of people for projects they've asked me to do. Would you park your car at Walmart, ask for someone to carry out your bags, and then not tell them where your car is? Would you then tell them you forgot to get some things and ask them to go back in and get them for you? Twice? Three times?

EvilHomer3k wrote:Malificent,
Do you feel you can contact your old boss? I'm sure they'll have some advice for you on how to improve. Does your new boss want you to keep the status quo or make changes? Did the old boss just make changes or did they discuss them with your current boss and make a decision together?

That's similar to the situation I'm in. Been at this college for 12 years. I have a 13 year old who is going to school in 5 years and an 11 year old in 7. Their tuition is fully paid if they go here and 80-100% if they go to another of about 130 private colleges. I've generally liked my job. It's still okay. Benefits are great. I have a new boss who is flexible and easy to work for. The problem is I'm beginning to dislike the work (not sure if it's general IT or just IT here). Its not difficult work for me but I don't enjoy it any more. It's mostly project management.

I've thought a lot about going back into teaching (I have a teaching license) but it would be a sizable pay cut and I'd lose the tuition remission that I currently have. I think I'd like teaching a lot more (I do some computer education and coaching and I definitely enjoy that). Actually, I know I"d like teaching. I had planned on teaching all through school but I fell into a tech job and have been there since. I've always kind of regretted that.

It would also mean I no longer have to drag details out of people for projects they've asked me to do. Would you park your car at Walmart, ask for someone to carry out your bags, and then not tell them where your car is? Would you then tell them you forgot to get some things and ask them to go back in and get them for you? Twice? Three times?

I can definitely contact my old boss - reminds me I need to schedule lunch with her. She's still local.

My new boss, which is now the head of the department that basically ran my old boss out the door...she wants change, if it can come from her. I forgot to say that the long list of changes that my old boss began to implementing were rejected by head of department...and now are slowly coming back as she or other people propose them. My old boss was a consultant, so she had been in a position where if a company called her in, it was because they needed to listen to her and her expertise. I think she thought it was going to be that way here. After all, they said when they hired her that it was to bring someone from the outside. And then head of department spent a year basically fighting with her. Sigh.

My department is dysfunctional, a fact that is well known throughout the school. But it's dysfunction I know, which is horrible but true. I guess my big concern is that I was a generalist in my old developer job, so I'm not sure if I could find a non-management job if I decided to quit this one. I'm not there yet. I'm at least better than I was.

I think that you become more marketable since you've done both the grunt work and management. Just be careful with the managment that you don't lose those coding skills. It's hard not to since you have a lot of other things to do but there are more jobs coding than their are managing people who do coding.

And I ran into my old boss at the grocery store and we chatted for a while. Funny how that works...

Malificent wrote:And I ran into my old boss at the grocery store and we chatted for a while. Funny how that works...

Weird coincidences. I ran into someone I worked with when we were touring daycares.

So where you are the marketing team has a group of web people? All of ours are in IT. Of course we aren't big enough to have IT in multiple areas.

EvilHomer3k wrote:

Malificent wrote:And I ran into my old boss at the grocery store and we chatted for a while. Funny how that works...

Weird coincidences. I ran into someone I worked with when we were touring daycares.

So where you are the marketing team has a group of web people? All of ours are in IT. Of course we aren't big enough to have IT in multiple areas.

We are dotted line to IT. We've been passed back and forth over the years.