bougiefever

Or rural Wisconsin

There's an old saying that whatever is worth doing is worth doing badly. So true. When I was in Germany, they have a saying that you start with "something to hate". Already knowing that what you're about to do is going to be crap makes it easy to get going. Then you set about fixing your crappy beginning. It gets you unstuck.

I think if you are compensated for it, and allowed to recuperate from middle-of-the-night working, it's ok. If the employee knew this was part of the job though, and not something that was thrust upon them after they were hired.

I was a contractor at a company that announced that developers would have to work through the nights and on weekends at times, and they couldn't take any extra work days off. So, if you had to do an upgrade to production and it took all night, you were still expected to work all day too. Oh, and you didn't get paid any extra for the overtime either. One person asked about work-life balance, and the response from that manager was that when you chose a career as a developer, you signed up for this. This is what happens when this kind of abuse becomes rampant. The managers then declare it comes with the job. Such BS! BTW, that guy quit along with anyone else reasonably competent.

There was one period in my life at a 401k administration place where I was responsible for making sure the transaction data for all of the clients made it to AIG every night. For months, I had to do the transmission manually at 7pm each night, which meant not much fun for me ever. I never even got a thank you, and when I finally managed to get it automated, my position was eliminated. At least they gave me a pretty good severance.

Yea, that is not very good for such a wealthy company. Other companies match up to the max allowable with no vesting period.

For example, there are a number of songs that include a rendition of Tom's Diner within a larger melody. Also popular to add to a song is the Arabian riff melody (which is so old it's not copyrightable, but you get my point) I don't know of any law suits around Tom's Diner song, but this is an example of the types of ridiculous lawsuits out there over copyright.

It's no mistake that they select the most unsympathetic people to try to weaken the protections for us all.

I've been developing software for over 20 years, and I still can't estimate how long something will take me when I've never done it before. This uncertainty needs to become more than just a stick to beat developers about the head and shoulders with. Most of the time the PMs understand this, but there have been many projects where they just don't get it. I have suffered great anxiety from being forced to give estimates when the truth is I have no clue. It depends on how easy it is and how many unforeseen issues I encounter. It was so bad that once my husband asked me how long it would be before I was done cooking something, and I practically had a meltdown. That's when I knew it was time to leave that team. Can we stop pretending we can forecast the unknown? (edit typo)

I like the list of things you can do to combat procrastination. It's all good to understand what drives it, but even better to know tactics that work to help you overcome it.

My grandmother died from this, and it is a horrible death. I really fear becoming a victim to this disease. Anything that can help, even a little, is so encouraging.

Every chance I get, I tell people not to use PayPal. They have done this repeatedly, and the people who are affected have absolutely no recourse unless they happen to own a popular newspaper. PayPal has been shamed into doing the right thing, and that seems to be the only recourse. From reports I've heard, their internal system doesn't exist, and they aren't a bank, so there is no legal recourse either.