Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mindmetoo]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050929/wr_nm/infospace_dc

We had always dreamed of this possibility. Now being taken over is generally the worst thing that can happen to you, in terms of job security. If you're part of the acquired ("bottom"), and not the acquirer ("top"), you can be darn sure if your job is in anyway done by someone else in the "top" it won't be there in about 4-6 months. When taken over you also have to believe the exact opposite of everything told to you.

We plan to make no changes = update your resume

It's not a take over, we view it more as a merger of equals = bend over, grease up.

At the end of the day, the synergies between the two companies allow us to repurpose the supply chain, improve the user experience, and expand core competencies = Christ, you've been bought out by bunch of idiots. Pray you're laid off and get a great severance package or you'll spend the next 5 years of your career going to Anthony Robbin's seminars.

All "bottom" employees are given a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? as a welcome gift = Everyone is going to be laid off, they just want your client list/patents/pension funds.

Anyway, the only advantage of a take over is if you have stock options and a take over could drive up the stock price above your strike price. Most option deals mean 2/3s of your options vest upon any take over agreement.

We had long abandoned the idea Infospace could ever become profitable, which might drive up the stock price. Our only hope was a take over.

[mindmetoo]

I entered the work force in 1991. The last 14 years have seen pretty low inflation and yearly raises at various companies I've been at have always been, on average, around 3 or 4%. No one was every happy with that. You generally won't get rich staying in one job for 10 years and getting your annual 3% COLA type bump up.

Most companies have an annual raise. Everyone gets a raise at the same time of the year. The time of year is never the same time from year to year, mind you. You start at X company and you're told annual reviews happen in June. Okay. Sure enough you get your annual review in June. The next year you're told annual reviews are in June. When June rolls around you're told circumstance beyond company control are forcing the annual review period to be delayed until August. August comes, you go through the review song and dance but then you're told the actual bump up won't be seen on your pay until October 1. The whole raise date slides forward a few months the third year you're at the company...

Everyone eventually gets their annual review. You're rated between 1 and 5. 5 is the best. You're practically an operating thetan and can bend space and time to your will. No one ever gets 5. 95% of employees get 3.5. Employees they're really afraid they might lose get a 4. They get a better raise. If the company wants to build a case for your dismissal you'll get a 2.5. If you get a 3, you might get the average salary increase but you don't get any stock options or other non-cash bonuses.

You're told this performance number is arrived at after careful discussion between you and your manager and is used to determine how large your raise is going to be. In reality two months previous HR already determined what you're getting. So a 3% raise. Hrm. What can you do?


The best way to get large annual increases is finding a new job.

And lying is key to getting more money.

Let's say you make 50K at your job. You decide you're worth 57K. So when you're in an interview with a potential employer and it's getting close to actual job offer time, you'll probably get asked about salary expectations. This is when you say "Well, at my current job I'm making 57K a year. I'm hoping you could at least match that."

Now you have to read the body language. Ideally, you want the employer to say "I think we can match that." If they really want you they might say "We could match that and do a little better." More money is good, of course, but that also might mean "We thought you'd ask for 65K and that's what we were prepared to pay. But we can get you for 59K and make you think we're really paying you well! What a deal!"

It's possible the potential employer might make a face. A bad one. If you really want to get the hell out of your current job, you might have to cover your ass and say "but that's negotiable. I'd take a bit less because this company offers a lot of chances for me to learn new things, the commute is shorter, and the foozball table in the lunch room says you've got a great work environment."

If that happens and you don't really, really want to leave your current job, or figure you can hack it for another year or two, you wait. Wait for the official job offer from the other company. They want to pay you 50K. Break even. All is not lost, however. You email your current boss and say "I've been offered a position at another company for 57K a year. [Again, a lie.] I really like my current position here. I'm in the middle of a couple big projects that would be messy to leave [loyalty]. I'll be up to 4 weeks vacation. And the new job offers a lousy commute. So if you can match their offer, I'd be more than happy to stay."

You might get the extra cash or you might be given best wishes in your future position. No problem because you have a firm job offer.

If you're the riskier sort, you can, of course, pretend you have a job offer at another company and hope they really really don't just wish you best of luck and show you to the door.

But lets say you really have it in mind to leave and you're getting paid exactly what you asked for, 57K. So you don't ask your current employer to match the offer. You can learn new things at this new company. They have a foozball table. And the commute is truly better. You're jazzed. You even get a better title. "Senior" is in the title. Or you're going to one of those ultra funky companies that survived the dot.com implosion and they let you pick your own job title. So you say "I want to be called Arch Bishop" and they say "that's no problem. We'll have the business cards on your desk the Monday you start." (Companies do this sometimes to make it hard for a job recruiter to get a list of staff and raid the staff... calling only the network engineers. What the hell does an Arch Bishop do?)

More often than not, the company you're about to leave will make an unprompted counter offer. "We'll give you 58K to stay." Next week it's 60K. Then 63K. And so on.[1] They top out at 65K. Now you think to yourself "if I was worth 65K at this company all these freaking years why didn't the batards pay me what I was actually worth?"

If you do leave your company, it is critical you ONLY give the minimum legal notice and you never tell anyone where you're actually going to. I've seen friends burned by giving a month or even two months notice. Suddenly employers who were like family become resentful. They take you off of all projects, relocate you to the broom closet... Worse, an employer, if he knows where you're going, might just call up that new employer and warn him about what a crook they've hired. That's happened to a friend as well and he had a job offer revoked!

Many of us might feel bad only giving 2 weeks notice, especially if one is in the middle of a big project. My feeling here is "oh well". When the company determines your job is superfluous they won't take into consideration things like "oh his wife is pregnant". No. You'll be shown the door. It's just business, you understand.

But what if you can't grub up a better job offer and you don't want to gamble that a fake job offer will pay real coin? Well, you have to suck up your 3% annual raise. So let's say you're making 50K a year. 3% is $1,500 extra a year. That's an extra $125 a month. Before taxes. After taxes that's about $80 extra a month.

Now we come to a glass is half empty/half full situation.

You can look at an extra $80 cash a month as being so small as to be derisory. Or you can look at it this way. Suppose once a month a stranger came up to you and gave you $80 cash. Would you say no? I wouldn't. I'd be pretty happy. Or better. You could think "Would you rather have $80 extra a month or a kick in the head?" You sometimes have to frame small raises in those terms. More or less.

_______________

[1] Back during the Y2K frenzy my friend had done some card walloper work in COBOL at a bank during his work term semesters. Around 1997 he started getting calls trying to get him to take jobs doing Y2K fixes. The contracts were for five years. 3 years to fix the bugs and 2 years post Y2K to fix the stuff they missed and the mess it caused. The calls from recruiters started to become more desperate and the salaries grew to outrageous proportions. Eventually he was offered US$200K a year and 5 years of guaranteed work. That's US$1 million. This was back when US$1=CAN$1.50. So after taxes, he'd have CAN$1 million. He turned it down. He reasoned it would be a lot of money but he'd be spending half a decade working in COBOL. Think how much the hardware and software world changes in 5 years. He'd have a lot of money in the bank but he'd have no marketable skills after.

[diablo3]

Cobol has a market, just only it is perceived not to have a market.
After all, a five year contract means there is still a lot of investment in it.
Mainframe based systems are not going to be easily replaced.

Unfortunately, there will eventually be a dying breed of programmers who worked with mainframes because the youngsters do not know the mainframe as well as the experienced. Mainframes were not easy to use, and so it took a long time to learn about mainframe operations.

With the possibility of being extinct as quickly as the technology, some people then move one step back to move 2 steps forward. Just a matter of choice.

[mindmetoo]

[diablo3]

No university student or worker these days do card punching or card walloping. Emulators and other software packages avoid this from happening.

Obviously, COBOL is not taught in universities anymore, but there is no crisis in this, as COBOL is not impossible to learn and pick up.

But with technology, and you are right, people want to make the biggest impact and flourish as early as possibly by solving big problems.

The 38 problem requires software and hardware architecture changes. Transiting from a 32 bit to a 64 bit timer will solve this problem for a long time. But I believe this problem will be more expensive than the Y2K problem.

[mindmetoo]

I used to work for KK Campbell (a legendary Toronto Internet guru) and Toronto's Eye magazine, part of Eye's pioneering efforts to merge print and the Internet. We were generally underpaid for our work. To make up, KK let us have unlimited storage and bandwidth on his servers. One guy hosted an indie music download site, back in the day when WAV files and 28.8K modems were the standards. He was quite ahead of his time.

Me I created the Arc-Hive, the Internet's ultimate repository for conspiracy files. KK was a big fan of my site. We were both really into the whole conspiracy thing (the Illuminatus Trilogy, the Krill Files, 50 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time, etc.) back in the '80s. I was not a believer. I was a hardcore skeptic. Having studied "Informal Logic" in university, I came to love bad arguments and collected them like people collect matchbooks or teaspoons. Conspiracy theorizing is such a goldmine of bad logic.

The Arc-Hive got a lot of traffic, owing to a listing in Yahoo and a site name that began with "A" which meant a listing right at the top. At some point my site received that stupid Pointcom Top 5% of the Web Award.

(The site doesn't exist anymore but someone crawled my site, grabbed all my files and my topic organization and put their own conspiracy archive online here. I found it a few years ago and asked him to change my topic headings. If I did resurrect my site, I didn't want it to seem like I actually copied my original organization from him.)

Back when those Heaven's Gates nuts joined their mothership, I found myself somewhat in vogue. I got calls from CBS News, the Dallas Morning News, and BBC. Nothing ever came of it, like a nice hotel room in New York and an appearance on a talk show. I did wrangle a rather disastrous interview on CFNY's Humble & Fred show, however. Humble Howard's brilliant comedy revolved around wanting to know if there was a conspiracy against their radio show. Fred kept looking like he was waiting for Humble to give him the cue to play the X-Files CD I noticed he had taken out.

Anyway, I would basically troll UFO and conspiracy related Usenet groups, save interesting or crazy posts, and then make them available via the Arc-Hive. I organized them under categories like "Black Helicopters", "Men in Black", "One World Government", "Banking Conspiracies", "UFOs", "Nazis", "The End Times", and "Kooks". My icon for the Kooks section was my favorite: a musical note with legs, arms, and a crazed look on its face.

Under my UFO section I had actually, unknowingly, archived a post by the Heaven's Gate people before they became famous. It was a Usenet post they made explaining that the flat response and lack of coverts they got from their USA Today ad was surely a sign that the UFO god was calling them home.

Under "Kooks" I put some Usenet article about fairies in Britain. I mean, where would you put it? The article was clearly the writings of a rather kindly but totally deluded old British man who really believed young half naked child-like fairies flittered about him. Given I've rarely been able to convince anyone over the age of 21 to date me (and not for lack of trying), I'm sure I'll become like him when I get really old. I got an email from his wife. The old coot had passed on and I guess his wife Googled for his name. (There was no Google back then so she maybe Hotbotted for his name.) She was very upset. She wasn't so much upset that I had absconded with her husband's words. No, her husband had a message and it had to get out: young topless child-like fairy creatures were flittering about drooling old men and it was damn well about time the world and Prime Minister John Major took notice! What upset her was I filed her husband's posting incorrectly. See, I had filed it under "Kooks". Her late husband was most certainly NOT a kook! I emailed the lady back an apology, blaming a fictitious Welsh summer intern, and removed the post.

I got an email once from a "famous" neo-Nazi, Milton Kleim. A number of years ago he had been identified as one of America's top ten most vile, active, and dangerous online neo-Nazis. He had written a famous Internet FAQ about "National Socialism". His FAQ tried to portray National Socialism as merely a cultural movement, people trying to protect their European heritage 'n' junk. The soft shoeing of the Nazi horrors was so blatant it needed a prime spot on my site. Kleim informed me that years ago he had a change in heart. Nazis were evil fuckers, after all. He felt sorry for all the pain and suffering he himself had caused and was trying with all his might to get people to pull his Nazi FAQ off of various web sites. He no longer wanted his name associated with his writing. I consulted KK about this. KK had read and wrote a lot about online Nazis and the Christian Identity movement. He even advised me not to put too much material about the Christian Identity movement on my site as they were really bad assed fuckers. One of their main leaders was a former Green Beret and had no problems killing people. Killing 'em dead. Since I was moving to Seattle I was actually going to be in their backyard, their front yard being East of the Cascades, Idaho, and Montana.

I had some weird post up there too about vampires, like how to raise one from the dead or some gothy shyte. That post actually generated the most email, usually from Dungeon Masters totally into their Ravenloft or Vampire the Masquerade campaigns. I was cautioned frequently that the material was very very occult stuff and harmful if swallowed by mere initiates of the raising dead vampire arts. Those types I ignored. Many, I'm sure, had sword collections but most were of the "I find pants too confining" crowd and rarely dragged themselves out of their parent's basement.

And then I got an email that made almost zero sense about a Usenet post I archived that also made zero sense but it looked like it had something to do with the end times. The email vaguely hinted that I should remove the post. I emailed the person back asking him if he was the author and got no response. I wrote him off as another Ravenloft type unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. I looked at the post, making sure it wasn't a how-to manual for kidnapping school girls and turning them into satanic breeders. It seemed to be something about the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

I nearly forgot about the email and the post when I got a call from KK Campbell. Someone had called him. He was an "official" from the Reformed 7th Day Adventist church. He had just flown into town and wanted a meeting to talk about the Arc-Hive post. I forwarded Campbell his original email and my response for more information. KK agreed the original email was entirely vague and the guy never got back. While waiting for the cracker, KK did some research. The guy showed up. He was a shifty guy with a briefcase. He was trying to play his cards very close to his vest but KK is a smart cookie and has seen a lot in his time. He knows how to read between the lines.

Campbell was able to get the full story out of the guy after some prodding. This church official was traveling the world trying to get this document removed from web sites, and doing it very quietly. It turns out this document was part of some huge libel suit brought forth by the Seventh Day Adventists against this breakaway scion. The Reformed Church had published some paper tract version. The original church sued. They reached an out of court settlement. The Reformed church would destroy all copies of the tract and never publish it again, or else be subject to some huge monetary payment. The author of the tract didn't entirely agree and released it to the Internet himself. This was clearly a violation of the out of court settlement and if it became public knowledge, oh boy. Boy oh boy. What exactly was so libelous about the document I have almost zero clue. I re-read it a couple times and couldn't even figure out what it was about, let alone what was so damaging to the Seventh Day Adventists.

We had no problem whatsoever removing the scandalous document. KK let him know, in parting, that he could have saved himself a trip to Toronto if he had simply been less cryptic in his original email.

[mindmetoo]

When I first started in the computer industry, it was with a tax software company. We were still distributing our software on floppy disk. Now accountants are notoriously cheap people and would reformat the disks to put their own files on them and then discover they needed to reinstall and didn't have the disks anymore.

One of the programmers suggested we distribute the software with the read/write tabs in the read only position. Anyone who couldn't figure out you need to keep your original disks for a $900 software program, would be likewise as clueless how to make his floppy disk writable.

The idea was nixed by the legal department. The reason? One of liability. What if we distributed the software with a virus and we wanted to lie about it? If the floppy disks were in read only mode and had a virus, it would be clear for all concerned where the virus came from. If the disks were read/write, then who is to say the disks didn't get infected from the customer's computer.