Advogato – 3 May 2000

(This is a re-post from Advogato, which I no longer use.)

3 May 2000 »

life
Working on getting my machine stack back in working order after an abortive attempt by Dan, my TLINetBSDG* to install a PC Card adapter into his Alpha desktop, which happens to be my cable modem’s gateway (long story). The adapter is PnP, and NetBSD’s PnP support is limited to x86, and so it’s looking grim unless he does some kernel hacking.

* Tame Live In NetBSD Geek

work

Working at A Big Client(sm) can be rewarding and fun occasionally. Tomorrow is no different: I get to wake up at 4 am for a 5 am start, because they go live on Monday, and are currently scheduling all the contractors out of hours so the market research people can work between midday and 5 pm before the contractors go back to work in an effort to make a stupid made-up deadline (see Death March, E. Yourdon, for reasons why this stuff is moronic). It’s a good thing that the work is really cool and Resume Enhancing ™.

email

E-mail was a mixed bag today. I don’t normally write about correspondance, but it was an interesting day. I got e- mails from my company saying that the possible US trip was off (bad), and another asking when my house lease was up (bad – they pay about 60% of the rent after they relocated me). Then I got another e-mail asking if I’d like to join another organisation. I think this may actually be ironic. Or it could just be karma. Buggered if I know. If you’re ever in the position of having to look after geek employees, here’s Andrew’s really easy method to look after them and make them happy:

Don’t fuck them around on the little things. Saving a few thousand per annum versus finding qualified new staff is not a saving. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Toys, big monitors, decent amounts of RAM and disk space are cheap. Good people aren’t.

Interesting and varied work with realistic and reachable deadlines is more important than pay

Pay them what they are worth in the market – but don’t be surprised if pay means little or nothing to geeks except as a method of keeping score with their peers. If you say you’re going to pay $x in bonuses, pay $x or more.